- Artist
- Anita Dube born 1958
- Medium
- Vitreous enamel and copper eyes
- Dimensions
- Overall display dimensions variable
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased with funds provided by the South Asia Acquisitions Committee 2013
- Reference
- T14088
Summary
Intimations of Mortality 1997 is a work by the Indian artist Anita Dube which comprises a large number of enamel and copper eyes of varying sizes, closely arranged and installed across one top corner of a room like a giant spider’s web. It is one of the earliest of a number of works in which Dube would employ these enamel eyes, commonly used in India for statues of Hindu deities. Dube actively likes to reuse materials in her work, believing that waste and disposal are inherently capitalist compulsions and that recycling is therefore an active form of resistance. The eyes are industrially manufactured, a glassy ceramic surface coated in a candy pink paint with a black iris and lined on the back with copper. They are used to animate the expressions of sculpted Hindu deities, gods and goddesses, so that they can watch over their followers. Dube enjoys the play between the sacred and the profane, saying, ‘For me the world of found objects has opened up new territories, including tradition. So when the context of an object – such as an idol, ritually worshipped in Hindu homes, is critically re-placed, the tension is very palpable. At that very juncture of this terrible juxtaposition is the space for thought in my work, the conceptual space.’ (Quoted in Bose Pacia Gallery 2005, n.p.)
Influenced by the fact that several of her family members are in the medical profession, Dube was drawn to the organs and bones of the human body. Allusions to the body politic and the corporeal forms of Hindu religious icons frequently appear in her work. She also invokes theoretical arguments on violence and the abject articulated in the work of theorists like Martin Heiddeger, Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva, who influenced or were influenced by surrealism when dealing with the fetishisation of violence. This is particularly evident in Dube’s series of sculptural works entitled Silence (Blood Wedding) 1998 (Devi Art Foundation, Delhi), and the Theatre of Sade 1999 consisting of objects including bones and instruments encased in velvet.
Intimations of Mortality belongs to a wider group of works using the same material, in three-dimensional, often site-specific wall drawings or arranged on the body and then photographed. In this configuration, seeping out from a corner of the ceiling, the effect of the eyes crowded together is reminiscent of a swarm of insects or cellular growths, a spreading cancer or virus, a threat that appears to be alive. The overall triangular shape also references the female form. Dube has likened such works to movements of people as a result of social persecution, saying that ‘The eyes are like people for me and this could speak of large migrations in history’ (quoted in Walker Art Center 2003, p.184). As such they act as a metaphor for the lived experiences of dislocation and dispossession caused by political and communal violence which form a central concern for the artist. In the South Asian context, anti-imperialist struggles, the Partition of India and subsequent violent birth of Pakistan and then Bangladesh are historically marked by mass movements of people. More recently, communal uprisings and religious violence in Maharashtra and Gujarat have coincided with the increasing political influence of the religious right.
Intimations of Mortality, as the title suggests, functions as a subtle yet uncanny mimetic warning. The work effectively represents the uneasy moment of encounter with a physical threat, evoking a visceral first reaction; it is difficult to confront and, comparable to the spread of disease within the body politic, threatens to disperse and envelop the remaining space. Intimations of Mortality was shown in the influential exhibition of global contemporary art How Latitudes Become Forms at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2003. It was also shown in London in a curated exhibition of art from South Asia at Philips de Pury, The Audience and the Eavesdropper in 2009.
Further reading
How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age, exhibition catalogue, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 2003, pp.184–5, reproduced p.185.
Anita Dube, exhibition catalogue, Bose Pacia Gallery, Delhi and New York 2005, reproduced on front and back inner cover flaps.
The Audience and the Eavesdropper: New Art from India and Pakistan, exhibition catalogue, Phillips, New York 2008, n.p.
Nada Raza
April 2013
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