Anita Dube
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Anita Dube | |
|---|---|
| Born | 28 November 1958 Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India |
| Education | Delhi University, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda |
| Occupation | contemporary artist |
| Years active | 1970 – present |
| Known for | Mixed media sculpture, installation art, art critic, writer |
Anita Dube (born 28 November 1958) is an Indian contemporary visual artist and art critic, whose work has been widely exhibited. She is known for her mixed media sculpture and installation art.
Dube was born on 28 November 1958 in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India to a family of physicians.[1]
She completed her B A. degree with honors in history from the University of Delhi (now Delhi University) in 1979.[2] She completed her M.F.A. degree in art criticism from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 1982.[3]
Career
Dube's training as an art historian at Baroda continues to influence her practice as a visual artist, as do her ties to the short-lived but extremely influential Indian Radical Painters' and Sculptors' Association, a group of predominantly Malayali contemporary artists (with Dube a rare exception) formed by K. P. Krishnakumar in Baroda in 1987 that forged an explicitly radical, socially and politically conscious approach to art making in contrast with the more figurative style of painting associated with an earlier generation of artists and faculty at Baroda. Their political position is most fiercely articulated in the manifesto-statement Dube wrote, titled 'Questions and Dialogue' (1987), reprinted in The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect (2021), part of the India Since the 90s series published by Tulika Books. The earlier generation at Baroda were largely part of the so-called "Baroda School" also sometimes called the "narrative painters," a group that came to prominence in the mid to late 1970s, and included figures such as Bhupen Khakhar, Nalini Malani, Vivan Sundaram, Jogen Chowdhury, Sudhir Patwardhan, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh and critic Geeta Kapur.[4]
In 1987, the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, led by Krishnakumar, held an exhibition "Questions and Dialogue" at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, which was accompanied by posters around campus and a manifesto, written by Dube, denouncing the commodification of art in general, and what they saw as the lack of sincere, effective political and social engagement on the part of the "narrative painters."[5] Dube and her peers at Baroda were committed to a radical project of challenging a retrogressive, bourgeois-centered art industry. This entailed, among other things, a conscious shift in medium: Dube and others focused on inexpensive, industrial materials and found objects in an effort to create works that resisted commodification, connected with working-class audiences, and directed a militant critique at bourgeois notions of art making, display and consumption.[6]
Following the exhibition, the group shifted its activities to Kerala, where another exhibition was held at Kozhikode in February, 1989. Also in 1989, the group staged a demonstration and published a pamphlet excoriating a Sotheby's auction held in Mumbai that year with support from the Times of India — still a novel concept for India's relatively quiet 1980s art market. "The Times of India’s sudden interest in Indian Art and Culture now shows that the Imperialists want to completely poison the people’s mind and life through antihuman projects for artists," it read, adding that the exhibition's invocation of "Timeless" India was the legacy of a "colonialist strategy to see everything as ‘timeless’, and now the Indian ruling classes see their country with the same eyes."[7]
Controversies
On 20 April 2025, Poet Aamir Aziz alleged that his poem ‘Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega’ was used without his 'knowledge, consent, credit or compensation' by Anita Dube. Dube, in a restricted private social media post, stated that she had made an ethical lapse in not crediting him."[8]
