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Anita Dube's body of work straddles several different genres, incorporating a wide range of materials and subjects in its exploration of individual and social experiences of loss, pain, pleasure and desire. In the present lot, a series of nine identical photographs of two palms joint in offering and covered in the ceramic eyes that are traditionally used to animate Hindu idols, Dube comments on the selective inclusivity of Indian ritual life and... Anita Dube's body of work straddles several different genres, incorporating a wide range of materials and subjects in its exploration of individual and social experiences of loss, pain, pleasure and desire. In the present lot, a series of nine identical photographs of two palms joint in offering and covered in the ceramic eyes that are traditionally used to animate Hindu idols, Dube comments on the selective inclusivity of Indian ritual life and the caste system, and its lasting repercussions on the psyche. Although she highlights the votive nature of these eyes in the Indian context, the artist also contravenes it to engage with "a secular, subjective, and political framework. This framework invokes, through the clustering of the eyes, the both revolutionary hordes and fascist formation. To Dube each eye is a person, a human substance reduced to its smallest denominator, it's essential, horrifying condition" (Philippe Vergne, "Anita Dube", Illegal, Nature Morte, New Delhi, and Bose Pacia, New York, exhibition catalogue, 2005, unpaginated).

Dube's "…use of sculptural fragments, of fragmented body parts, invokes a humanist's critical agenda as well as a need for permanent uncompromising transgression as the underlying matrix of her practice. Her work is an aggressive metaphor that threatens the established order: the order of a country structured on multiple divisions from the caste system, to religious difference, to gender barriers, and the order of canon imposed either by tradition or by the dogmatism of modernism. Because she permanently aims to liberate her own practice and its genealogy, she embodies what Homi K. Bhabha has called a ‘relocation of culture.' The alternative she proposes is constructed on contradiction and ambiguity and therefore belongs to a middle ground, a metaphorical third space as well as a third sex" (Ibid.).

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