Seated at her south Delhi home, her abode for 25 years, Anita Dube tells us how she had asked for a day to ponder when Riyas Komu, founder-secretary of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), invited her to curate the fourth edition of the Biennale. “I was pleasantly surprised, but I needed some time to decide and figure out the logistics. It’s a huge decision, but then I thought I’m up for it. As artists, we function in a more private world, there are more interiorities involved, but this is an exercise in exteriority. It is exciting and challenging because it is such a big platform. We all have ideas, but we need to know how to execute them,” she says. For the first time, a woman artist will helm the KMB. “A friend said that it took 10 Documenta editions (one of the most well-regarded contemporary international art festivals) for them to appoint a woman curator. This is the fourth edition of KMB; so, in that sense, it’s a very progressive decision. It is also a validation of the enormous contribution that women have made to Indian art and culture,” she says. When Dube was announced as the curator for KMB 2018, the responses from the art world varied from surprise to jubilation, given her conceptual and politically-charged oeuvre. Known for her socially-conscious work that borrows equally from personal memories and everyday realities, Dube successfully entwines imagery with her investigations into contemporary life. Dube is quick to acknowledge that her appointment comes at a crucial time. “For this to happen now, sends out a message. Historically, with the right-wing pushing in all corners of the world, it has become all about hypermasculinity — they don't want to listen to the voices of women. That leads to a self-righteous understanding of the world,” says Dube, 57. As she readies to make Kochi her home for a large part of 2018, bringing together artists and artwork in a terrain whose language and workings are unfamiliar to her, Dube is visibly excited. She has always been keen to explore distant lands and opportunities. Born to doctor parents in Lucknow, the desire to experience life in the big city had brought Dube to Delhi in 1975. A rebel and a nonconformist, she found the capital stimulating, but not arresting enough to keep her back. After graduating in history from Delhi University, she finally found the stimulus she was looking for, and her vocation, in Baroda. She secured admission into the famed MS University, even though she had no background in art, and flourished under the mentorship of faculty member, Gulammohammed Sheikh, with whom she shared a love for poetry. During an extended three-year postgraduate course in art history and criticism, Dube learned not just the precepts of art but also the techniques, by attending lectures held across the campus and observing fellow artists. She was introduced to the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, a group of predominantly Malayali contemporary artists formed by KP Krishnakumar in Baroda in 1987. The collective challenged the figurative style associated with the Baroda school and sought a more radical and politically-conscious approach. Art was meant to address the conditions of the marginalised and respond to its surroundings. The only woman member of the group, Dube wrote its manifesto that denounced the commodification of art. Though the group disbanded after Krishnakumar’s suicide in 1989, it left a lasting impression on Dube. “It was a shortlived group, but the ramifications were huge. It affected people’s lives, discourse and the way we view art,” says Dube, who, like most practising artists from the collective, began experimenting with carved and painted wood in the late ’80s, with occasional writings. “I was around 30 when I moved from art criticism to making things with my hands. I found it was much more stressful to juggle words than material,” says Dube. Creating installations, photographs and charcoal drawings, she employs materials as varied as bones, wire, velvet and foam. Over time, her trajectory evolved. She found her unique language for artistic discourse in found objects, that were given an alternate face. Having first noticed enamelled eyes, usually affixed to idols of Hindu deities in a Gogi Saroj Pal work, Dube returned with several bags of these in variable sizes on a subsequent trip to old Delhi. She began by pasting them in the corners where the ceiling meets two walls, in works such as Mortality (1997). Soon, the peering eyes started wandering: in Disease (River) (1999), these branched out, and, in Strike (2014), they again came together to impart a sense of urgency to question the purpose of war. She was among the eight artists included in the first show that Nature Morte gallery mounted in India in 1997. One of her seminal works, she says, came the same year. She used bones as an armature and encased it in velvet, embellishing them with beads and lace in Silence (Blood Wedding). The installation was influenced by personal turmoil — dealing with a fraught relationship and her father being diagnosed with a fatal illness. It denoted the body as a site of both pleasure and pain, where Dube moved backwards, from death to life. In From The Theatre Of Sade (1998-99), she wrapped common objects such as artificial dentures and a book in melancholic black velvet, raising the red flag on the rise of right-wing politics in India. Over time, she drifted away from writing proactively, but words remained critical to her practice. She used them differently though — in Seven Deadly Sins (of Capitalism), she used steel wires covered in black velvet to write the words “Abjection”, “Corruption”, “Violence”, “Pornography”, “Pride”, “Poverty” and “Complicity”. In her 2005 landmark performance, Keywords, she brought together performance art with critical textual discourse. She used her late father’s scalpel to carve provocative words out of buffalo meat. The text brought to fore issues that called for a discussion: “Sexual Love”, “Ethics” and “Permanent Revolution”. “It was a homage to my father, who wanted me to be a surgeon. He passed away in 1997. This was me saying I am doing another kind of surgery as an artist. It dealt with questions regarding the embodiment of theory,” says the artist, who has just set up her studio in Kaladham in Greater Noida. The current times and the growing curbs on freedom of expression are a matter of concern for her. One of the signatories to the petition that condemned attacks on writers in India and supported authors who had returned their Sahitya Akademi awards in October 2015, Dube had responded to caste discrimination by paying tribute to BR Ambedkar and discussing the political debate on cow slaughter through her work at the 2016 India Art Fair. “I don’t set out to make political work, but if you are invested in this course of living in this time, it is inevitable. I don’t know what are we going to produce through institutions now. So far, culture had been away even from moral policing; we have gotten away with edgy work. But, when the two worlds collide, there will be a tremendous problem,” she says. With the Biennale, too, she hopes to raise relevant questions to address this ongoing crisis. She warns that it might be smaller in scale, but more focused. “My subjectivity and worldview will be involved. I am interested in bringing in the voices of those who have been marginalised — women, Dalits, the gay community,” she says.
