Aamir Aziz, Anita Dube and the hypocrisy of political art

The problem with artist Anita Dube’s use of lines from a poem by activist Aamir Aziz has been best articulated by the aggrieved poet himself in his posts on social media on 20 April. As facts stand, there is no wiggle room for any ethical debate about ‘good intentions’ versus ‘poor outcomes.' But there is a scope to look at this controversy as a symptom of a deeper malaise that’s only going to get worse with time. But first, the facts.

At her ongoing show at Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery (VAG), titled Timanjila Ghar, Dube used several lines from Aziz’s poem, Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega, as part of some of her artworks. While she attributed her source, she didn’t seek Aziz’s consent to use his poem. Any self-aware artist, let alone a senior practitioner like Dube (who curated the 2018 Kochi Biennale), should know the protocol for borrowing from her living contemporaries. At the VAG show, Dube alludes to many thinkers—Orwell, Mandela, Freud, Ambedkar, to name a few—but most of them are dead, and their works are out of copyright. Aziz is an exception.

In 2020, during the nationwide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, Aziz first shared his poem on social media. It didn’t take long for it to become an anthem of the movement, alongside Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s fiery Hum Dekhenge. At the height of its popularity, Aziz’s poem was read out by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd at a concert in London. Already viral on Indian social media, the poem found an instant global audience.

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If social media virality brings attention and acclaim, it also creates a vast space for exploitation. Not a day goes by without one creator accusing another of misusing their content—from misattribution to blatant plagiarism, these offences cover a gamut of black, white and grey areas.

On the internet, it’s relatively easier to shame the accused into taking down an offending post or story. At worst, the culprit loses some followers, has a rough few days in the comment section, and then the world moves on to the next social media trial. It’s the law of the wild, wild world of the internet.

In the real world, though, the rules of the games are not the same, especially when the stakes are high—monetarily or in terms of personal brand-building. Although Dube has tried to defend her action, claiming that her intention was to “celebrate” the poem, as Aziz pointed out, quoting the poem at a public protest is, indeed an act of celebration. But to put it inside a white cube, with a fat price tag on it, without telling its creator, is cavalier disrespect.

When Aziz complained to VAG on 19 March, the gallery pulled out the disputed works from sale, though they remained on display till the show ended on 19 April. In a statement, the gallery expressed its commitment “to all artists and their creative expressions”—a textbook case of having one’s cake and eating it too. Such comments not only trivialize the gravity of the problem but also reinforce the hypocrisy on which so-called ‘political art’ continues to thrive in the intensely commercial ecosystem of making, selling and buying art.

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It has now emerged that Dube had also showed some of her other work at the India Art Fair 2025, featuring Aziz’s poems without his knowledge. At that carnival for the elite, sponsored by some of the biggest corporate giants, it would have been a miracle if anyone had noticed such an infraction rather than the price of the work, or the latest fashion in contemporary art.

As AI continues to train itself to become better imitators of everything that is beautiful and mysterious, it is critical to have exacting standards of transparency about every stage of the creative process. In 2023, Boris Eldagsen, a German artist, used DALL-E, an AI tool, to generate an image, titled Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, which won the Sony World Photography Award. In a bizarre turn, the jury still wanted to confer the prize on Eldagsen even after being told about the deception, but the artist refused it, because “AI is not creativity,” as he said.

The art of deception may not always involve such dramatic gestures. Sometimes all it takes is a seemingly innocuous slip for everything to become a slippery slope.

An earlier version of this piece mistakenly stated that VAG had taken down the paintings from sale only after Aamir Aziz's social media posts. The error is regretted.