We arrive at Kaladham, an artist community in Greater Noida, where Dube’s studio is located. The colony, established in the early 2000s as a government-promoted initiative, provides artists with expansive studio spaces away from the urban sprawl. Dube welcomes us into her loft-style home, where mosaic and exposed concrete chiaroscuro the facade, and the expansive, multi-storied interiors which houses her studio and a living space in higher levels. She shows us a few of the works in progress for her upcoming solo at Vadehra Art Gallery in May.
“When I touched material, I realised that this was the calling.”
Dube’s early engagement with art was deeply intellectual. Before she became a maker, she was a critic and theorist. As the only woman in the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association (1986–1989), she penned Questions and Dialogue, an essay interrogating the role of the artist and the structure of institutions. Yet, writing soon gave way to an immersive material practice. “When I touched material, I realised that this was the calling,” she reflects. This transition led to an assemblage-based approach—velvet, beads, dentures, industrially manufactured ceramic eyes, and found objects—each carrying its own social and personal resonance.
“I’m not religious, but I’m interested in the sacred.”
This paradox manifests in her work. Desert Queen and Intimations of Mortality, recently exhibited at the Barbican Centre, evoke a tension between the celestial and the corporeal—a night sky punctuated with glimmering beads, a hide stretched taut after slaughter. The enamel-and-copper eyes, ubiquitous in her practice, serve as silent witnesses to histories of migration. The labour-intensive quality of her work, shaped in part by the sewing and embroidery techniques passed down by her mother, becomes a form of resistance.
Beyond her individual practice, Dube has been a key figure in shaping India’s contemporary art landscape. She co-founded Khoj International Artists’ Association, fostering experimental and collaborative projects that have nurtured generations of artists. In 2018, she became the first woman to curate the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, foregrounding the theme of possibilities for a non-alienated life. With over ninety artists presenting works across ten unconventional sites, the Biennale became an exercise in bridging, collective imagination, that made art accessible to a wider audience and residents of Kochi.
“You have to speak in a language that touches people,” she says. “Your work should be able to enter their world. It’s fundamental, it’s the spine.” From the textual to the material, from critique to practice, her art remains an assertion—a refusal to be contained, an insistence on art’s power to disrupt, transform, and endure.
Born in 1958 in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, Anita Dube continues to live and work in New Delhi.
