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May 2005, New York - Bose Pacia Gallery presents
Illegal, a solo exhibition of new work by
Anita Dube from May 14th through June 25th, 2005. The gallery is located at 508 West 26th Street on the 11th Floor, in the Chelsea district of New York City. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 12 to 6 pm and by appointment. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, May 14th from 6 to 8pm. The public is invited.
Trained as an art historian and critic, Anita Dube's work is individualized yet provocatively informed by its cultural context. She has developed an aesthetic language that explores a divergent range of subjects that address a profound concern for loss and regeneration – both autobiographical and societal. Dube's most recent works comment on war, destruction, and legality; creating ensembles that call to mind ruined cities, the clash of cultures and the contemporary spectacle of violence. The current exhibition titled Illegal includes sculptures and installations that employ lights, recycled debris, and skins of bandages.
In Karbalas, Dube has crafted a rotating screen from recycled materials overlaid with photographic transparencies of images from the Iraq War. The images embedded in the screen express collective anger and a shared sense of the tragedy. Her statement is an elegy of sorts for a grand civilization that has been humiliated by the excesses of war, violence, and western hegemony.
The title work Illegal consists of 11 light box pedestals with silkscreen prints on acrylic sheeting. As a group of small scale-sculptures, they enshrine and become monuments to acts of destruction that are otherwise forgotten and easily discarded. Articulating her political ideas through a poetics of demonstration, Dube attempts to locate a larger social purpose to construct both personal and collective memories of war.
Anita Dube studied art criticism from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda, India. She was involved in the activities of the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association until 1989. Anita Dube has had numerous exhibitions including ARS 01 at the Kiasma Museum (Helsinki, 2001); The Mega Wave (Yokohama Triennale, 2001); How Latitudes Become Forms at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, 2003); The Tree from the Seed at the Henie Onstad Museum (Oslo, 2003). This is her first solo exhibition at Bose Pacia. The artist lives and works in New Delhi.