“She didn’t mention this in our first conversation. She hid it. Deliberately. Let’s be clear: if someone holds my poem in a placard at a protest, a rally, a people’s uprising I stand with them. But this is not that,” Aziz said.He added that his poem “written in velvet cloth, another carved in wood, hung inside a commercial white cube space, renamed, rebranded, and resold at an enormous price without ever telling me”.”This is not solidarity. This is not homage. This is not conceptual borrowing. This is theft. This is erasure. This is entitled section of the art world doing what it does best extracting,consuming, profiting while pretending radical,” the 35-year-old said.Terming it “outright cultural extraction and plunder”, Aziz said it stripped authors of autonomy “while profiting off their voices, especially those from marginalised backgrounds.””Their work is used without their knowledge, precisely so they can be excluded from the wealth produced through it. I have sent legal notices. Demanded answers. Asked for accountability.”In return: silence, half-truths, and insulting offers.”He also claimed the gallery refused to take the work down even when asked to.”What Anita Dube has done isn’t a gesture of solidarity or resistance, it’s the oldest trick in the book, inherited from the same colonial masters: steal the voice,erase the name, and sell the illusion of originality. It is the systematic erasure of authorship in favour of profit,” Aziz alleged.Responding to Aziz’s post, Dube claimed the intent of quoting his poem was to celebrate it and she had reached out to him to apologise.”I have been in love with ‘Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega’, especially some lines which swirled around in my head like dervishes. As a visual artist I work with materials that I love, that become means to critically comment, and the intent of quoting words from Aamir Aziz’s poem was to celebrate them,” Dube said in a statement.She added that she has quoted Martin Luther King, Bell Hooks and other in the same spirit of “fellow-traveller solidarities and spirit of the Commons and Copyleft.””I realise that I made an ethical lapse in only giving credit, but not checking with Aamir using words from his poem. However I reached out and called him, apologised, and offered to correct this by remuneration. Aamir instead chose to send a legal notice, and then I had to go to a lawyer as well,” the artist said.Her ongoing show, “Three Storey House”, showcases her recent body of works, including sculptures, mixed-media compositions, and a kinetic installation.Dube said the works were immediately put “not for sale” and hoped to resolve this issue “in a fair manner.”The gallery also issued a statement, expressing the hope that the issue between the two artists can be “resolved in an amicable and constructive manner.””We have been in touch with Aamir Aziz and his legal representatives for over a month. This is a situation that we have taken very seriously. We immediately ensured that the works Aamir Aziz has concerns with were not offered for sale. We remain committed to all artists and their creative expressions, and for building respectful dialogue across the art community,” the gallery said in a statement.
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