Last week, poet Aamir Aziz accused Anita Dubey, one of the major contemporary artists of India, who was using his words without permission in the four artifacts displayed at the promise art gallery in New Delhi. Phrase in question, All will be remembered ,Everything will be missed), The 2019-2020 Citizenship Amendment Act became a rally cry during the protest against the law, which excluded Muslims and challenged India’s secular foundation. Aziz’s poem caught the anger and hope of a generation. Its use of Dube – without credit or consent – solidarity, ownership, and the widespread differences between the world and political realities that often claim to join it.
Aamir Aziz
Solidarity
Aziz wrote in an Instagram post, “If someone in protest, a rally, revolt of a rally, a people, I stand with them. But it is not,” Aziz wrote in an Instagram post that he called “Khanda Khand”. “This is not solidarity … This is a lump sum cultural extraction and loot, separating the writers of autonomy by removing their voices.”
In response, Dube accepted in a “moral omission” – one, which could be legally, for copyright violations. In a Facebook post, he called for the ethos of the Commons and the Copleft, the “lost old world where fellow passenger solidarity” was mourned, when political art was freed independently as a collective property in the service of resistance.
But it was not active. It was a commercial gallery show, where according to a dealer’s formula, it can work that it has been cumily worked between ₹ 80 lakh and ₹ 1 crore.
Anita Dubey in Kochi-Muziris Bienle. Photo Credit: Thulasi Kakkat
Exhibition of Dub, Three -storey houseProtests to comment on India’s current political atmosphere, using poetry and symbolism, were conceived as a criticism of totalitarianism. In the intention, it aligned with Aziz’s message. But as this dispute explains, solidarity is not created on shared ideas alone. It demands consent, cooperation and mutual respect.
As writer and activist Kavita Krishnan mentioned in response to Dub’s post: “Aamir is a young poet who has no resource at all than you. Surely you should respect him first to talk to him, get his consent, and make sure that he is an issue, or with him, he is not even, he can cooperate – but with mutual honor.”
After Aamir Aziz
Photo Credit: vadehraart.com
The lost comments
India’s contemporary art scene emerged with the minimum public infrastructure after the 1990s economic liberalization. It was shaped by collective ambition: Artists formed colleges, collectors opened museums, and initiatives such as the Bharat Kala Fair began to chart a global footprint. Despite his personal foundation, the scene carried forward a strong sense of cooperation.
Anita Dubey was both a product – and a leading – of that feeling. As a former critic and a member of the Marxist-influenced Indian radical painters and the sculptor association, and later in 1997, as a co-founder of the Khoj International Artists Association, he helped imagine the “cooperative, non-donation” location for experimentation. In 2018, she became the first woman to cure the Kochi-Muziris Bienle, an artist, who began as a rejection of growing commercialization of art.
But today, that ethos feels rapidly hollow. Instead of united in caste, class, religious and institutional lines to oppose powerism, the world of Indian art often works in Silos. A world fulfills elite classes, galleries and bialects. Other, often made of artists outside the world of formal art, speaks, uncertainly, on the road. Their paths, rapid, do not cross.
Three -storey house Promise in Art Gallery. Photo Credit: vadehraart.com
Responsibility among growing markets
A counterpoint artist comes from Sameer Kulvur, who was also associated with Aziz’s poetry. Their timeleps video Male dhar (One uncomfortable reflects the original shape of one house morning in another, questioning the feeling of comfort and durability associated with space) borrowed his title from a poem by Aziz. “I came into the poem on Instagram and it had strangely aligned with animation which I had just made. So, I dropped a message to seek permission on Instagram … and he was really pleased,” says Kulvur. “If we come from different worlds, the artwork and its sharing should be a way to complete the audience growing together.”
India’s art market is priced at around $ 300 million, which is powered by a guardian with increasing domestic demand, global interest, rapid auction and deep -pocket mentors. But it spreads to a fragmented scenario – shaped by disruptions from technologies such as quick globalization, political anxiety, social media optics and AI.
This moment brings opportunity, but it also asks for responsibility. As artists, curator, galleries and institutions grown in ambitions, they should also grow in accountability. In the race to expand the markets, they cannot lose the vision of voices that gave meaning to their work in the first place.
All will be rememberedNow what does it matter how we choose to move forward.
Culture writer and editor specializes in reporting art, design and architecture.
Published – April 30, 2025 01:32 pm IST
