Important Notice

Anita Dube, initially trained as a critic and art historian at the M.S. University in Baroda, initiated her own artistic practice as a result of her brief involvement with the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association in that city. The objective of this short lived collective, founded in the 1980s, was to encourage the development of critical socio-political consciousness through their work, and this idea continues to animate Dube's... Anita Dube, initially trained as a critic and art historian at the M.S. University in Baroda, initiated her own artistic practice as a result of her brief involvement with the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association in that city. The objective of this short lived collective, founded in the 1980s, was to encourage the development of critical socio-political consciousness through their work, and this idea continues to animate Dube's diverse oeuvre.

Concurrently macabre and beautiful, Dube's work spans a wide range of media and frequently alludes to the politics of identity and location and the discourse of gender. “The human and specifically the feminine within society is usually the context in which the polarities of tradition and modern, virtuous and immoral, progress and stagnation, love and hate are situated” (Deeksha Nath, Private/Corporate IV: Works from the Lekha and Anupam Poddar, New Delhi, and DaimlerChrysler Collections: A Dialogue, DaimlerChrysler AG exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 2007, p. 32).

In the present lot, the artist adopts Victor/Victoria, the famous 1982 musical comedy starring Julie Andrews and James Garner, as the vehicle for her interrogation of identity, gender and their stereotypes. In the film, Andrews pretends to be a female impersonator, or a man playing a woman, in order to find work on the stage. Victoria morphs into Victor, who takes Paris by storm with his flamboyant lifestyle and performances, and leaves a trail of admirers behind him, both male and female. In this installation, Dube hangs two bright fiberglass mannequins side by side, draped in layers of crinkled fabric. Provocatively challenging the viewer to assign them with the various labels of gender and sexuality that are so liberally, and often thoughtlessly, handed out in contemporary society, Dube seems to suggest that any attempt to pigeon-hole identity is a slippery slope.

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