"Chance Pieces" brings together a variety of sculptures, wall-based works and text pieces by the Delhi-based artist Anita Dube. This will be her first solo exhibition in Germany. Primarily a sculptor, Anita Dube (born in Lucknow, India in 1958) works in a wide variety of media and materials. Throughout her career, Dube has resisted making her work too absolute; her avoidance of pronouncements allows her to see art as “a form of speculation that attempts to turn people’s attention towards something.” In the large-scale sculpture "Little Weapons of Defense", Dube has constructed a freestanding jali screen (similar to those found in Mughal architecture) from discarded styrofoam packing materials. Nestled into the jali’s spaces are rudimentary weapons, rock-shaped objects with skins of black velvet which seem to bleed over the structure. Exploring issues of the body, gender, and disguise, velvet has long become a signature material of the artist.
Dube’s on-going investigations into personal and societal loss and regeneration pry apart the political obstacles that get in the way of the human element, sometimes in its bare rawness. "Ah (a sigh)" enlarges a degenerated newspaper image of striving Indians and spells out a Hindi character across its surface with velvet-covered tree roots. Such works are indicative of her use of a conceptual language that valorizes the sculptural fragment as a bearer of personal and social memory, history, mythology, and phenomenological experience. Her aesthetic approach to textuality is combined with an engagement with the intimacy of touch and a Gnostic exploration of the abstractions of linguistic systems. She employs a variety of found objects and materials drawn from the realms of industrial waste (foam, plastic, wire), indigenous craft (thread, beads, fabrics), the physical human (dentures, bones, body parts), and sacred iconographies (enamel idol eyes, mantras, hymns, poetry, calligraphy).
Trained as an art critic at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda, Anita Dube came to her artistic practice through her involvement with the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, a group of young artists formed in the late 1980s whose critical, social and political consciousness contrasted with the more established discourse of post-modernist, narrative painting of the previous generation which dominated Indian contemporary art at that time. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at Lakeeren Gallery, Mumbai in 2013, Galleria Marabina, Bologna in 2012, Bose Pacia, New York in 2008, Almine Reich, Paris in 2007, Gallery SKE, Bangalore in 2006, and Nature Morte, New Delhi in 2005. Her works are included in prestigious institutional collections such as the Devi Art Foundation and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi and Tate Modern in London.
Image: © Anita Dube, Nature Morte Berlin
