Comrade In Art

It’s time for India’s favourite biennale! Get ready for an explosion of canonical art from the leftist, feminist and queer archive, courtesy its ‘radical’ and first ever female curator ANITA DUBE.

- Georgina Maddox

The first reveal of Anita Dube’s curatorial premise for the 2018 edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale was held in the palatial home of art collectors, Shalini and Sanjay Passi, at Delhi’s posh Golf Links Road. A Gatsby-ish evening with the who’s who of India’s art cognoscenti—Passi announced The Shalini Passi Art Foundation (which supports this year’s Biennale), and Dube read her manifesto. Dube’s curatorial approach is perfectly captured within the title of the theme—“Possibilities for a NonAlienated Life”. She explains, “The need to listen, think, and learn with each other, particularly voices from the margins—of women, of the queer community, of the oppressed castes, of the whispers of nature—with a spirit of comradeship is vital.” Dube’s entrenchment as one of the ‘significant’ contributors to the art world that is primarily driven by a capitalist market has moved away from those early days of struggle, but her ideological Leftist stand ap pears not to have changed. To be fair, all artists who follow an alternative practice and have only a privatised module to rely on for patronage face the dichotomy. It leaves a yen for a systemic change, one that she seems to throw out there as a kind of wish fulfilment in her curatorial venture.

KNOW YOUR CURATOR