In her recent show—Three Storey House—at Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi, contemporary visual artist Anita Dube explores the biopolitical nature of our identities, often turning to text, poetry, and symbolism as tools of resistance that evoke our personal and political engagements with the world at large. She explains, “My practice can be described as hybrid. It emerges from my deep engagement with both text and visuality. I began as a writer, so language and text have always been an integral part of my process.” For Dube, art is about communication; communicating ideas, emotions, or experiences.
In the show, the structure of the three floors moves from pleasure to love, from black and white to colour. The ground floor, which is black and white, represents the past. Dube worked exclusively in black and white for the last 15 years, never touching colour. The isolation of the pandemic pushed her into a deep interiority, and the works on the top floor come from that space. They are small, intimate, and meditative. After 15 years of black and white, she embraced colour again.
Reflecting on her early work as an artist, Dube started out with carving wood in the late ’80s and continued working with it for nearly a decade. Later, she combined metal and welded steel, and eventually, exhausted with the labour-intensive processes, she took a hiatus for about a year. “I did not do anything until I chanced on velvet as a material, and I was completely entranced by its qualities. Since then, I have been very loyal to it—you could call it the love of my life,” the 66-year-old artist says
Her parents were both doctors. Drawing from that, in this exhibition, she has used dentures and bones, things she is familiar with from her father’s surgical practice. Then there is text in the form of poetry and phrases, all becoming part of her artistic vocabulary. Fascinated with the ‘gaze’, the Delhi-based artist makes it the centre of her approach to investigate ideas of identity and politics, of memory and history. For her, the eye is a vessel of essence, a compression of a human being into something singular and powerful. Each eye for Dube is a person, alive, charged with energy, and beautiful. “These are qualities we associate with the divine, but why should the gods have it all? Why shouldn’t we? So, in my work, I steal it from the gods, let each of us carry those wonderful qualities that divinity is supposed to hold,” she says.
Dube reinstates her commitment to pleasure and pedagogy. “…because pedagogy is the element of learning in anything we do. And I believe that without pleasure, you cannot educate”. She feels that as an artist, if you want to communicate something serious, something that carries depth or wisdom, one has to devise a language that has pleasure as a component. Only then can you reach people. “Unless you move people emotionally, you cannot move them to think. And if you don’t move them to think, they will refuse to engage,” she explains.
The artist has never been trained formally. She feels that this has allowed her the freedom to experiment and the ability to welcome change. “I think it is important to remain engaged, to be surprised by your work. That’s where the real joy lies—when new ideas emerge, when your work even takes you by surprise,” she smiles. Little wonder that with each show she surprises the audience too