Midnight Dreams: The Tragedy of a Lone Revolutionary

Speaker: Anita Dube

April 27, 2011 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Anita Dube breaks a silence of twenty years to talk about the figure of K P Krishnakumar (1959- 1989): charismatic person, brilliant artist, and leader of the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association. His meteoric career and premature death makes him the stuff of legend within contemporary art history. In an hour long paper, using a structure of quotation and commentary, a surreal method of allowing the mind to excavate buried material as if from the unconscious, she attempts to look at the “still life” from as many different angles and points of view as possible, working towards a process that can help break down myths to reveal the concrete.

Anita Dube is one of the leading Indian artists today, with a major international reputation. Having started her career as an art historian and critic, she works with a conceptual language that valourizes the sculptural fragment as a bearer of personal and social memory, history, mythology and phenomenological experience. She was a member of the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association and wrote their manifesto Questions and Dialogue in 1987.