Anita Dube

Forty years ago, my mother and father came to Oslo from Lucknow, a provincial capital in north-central India, to work at the Ullevål hospital for two years. This was their one and only journey together to the West, out of the skin of their provincial life.

Like a "sweet dream", this modern utopia inspired their struggles back home, in the messy circumstances of underdevelopment.
At that time, I was a four year old baby, left behind in my aunt’s care. And strangely, today I return to this memory place, perhaps to bring a mythical journey full circle. From images to reality and back to images.

To imagine a relationship between surgery and art… life affirming, transformative.

I have brought with me many fragments. Photographs from the family album, my parents’ surgical tools. And my magazines on current affairs that contain images of genocide and famine at home. I have a desire to work in the same hospital as they worked in, but I can only work with images; of wounds, skin diseases and cancer.
As an artist I have to perform another kind of surgical operation. A poetic mastectomy … a journey I have to find my place in, and make sense of.

Anita Dube