Kochi-Muziris Biennale: Anita Dube is striving to make art more inclusive

Given Dube's deeply political works, it will not be surprising if the biennale, too, carries political overtones

In 1987, Anita Dube, then 29, wrote the catalogue text for the first-ever exhibition by the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association — a short-lived but influential art group founded in Baroda in response to the growing capitalist tendencies in the art world. Titled “Questions and Dialogues”, it had Dube rejecting the idea of art as a cultural commodity. Instead, she called for a more inclusive process of creating art. “In the swamp of class-society, the swamp-filled darkness of repression, all ‘human substance’ is petrified. Yet, through the swamp, voices have risen; vital potential voices of ‘man’,” she wrote.

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