Their political position is most fiercely articulated in the manifesto-statement Dube wrote, titled 'Questions and Dialogue' (1987), reprinted in The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect (2021), part of the India Since the 90s series published by Tulika Books.
[4] In 1987, the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, led by Krishnakumar, held an exhibition "Questions and Dialogue" at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, which was accompanied by posters around campus and a manifesto, written by Dube, denouncing the commodification of art in general, and what they saw as the lack of sincere, effective political and social engagement on the part of the "narrative painters.
This entailed, among other things, a conscious shift in medium: Dube and others focused on inexpensive, industrial materials and found objects in an effort to create works that resisted commodification, connected with working-class audiences, and directed a militant critique at bourgeois notions of art making, display and consumption.
"[7] When the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association disbanded in 1989, following the death of KP Krishnakumar, Dube shifted her focus from writing and criticism to making visual art, developing an aesthetic idiom that utilizes found objects and industrial materials, word play and photography in order to offer a sustained analysis and critique of existing social and political conditions in India and beyond.
Philippe Vergne, in a 2003 essay, writes that Dube's work "privileges sculptural fragment as a cultural bearer of personal and social memories, history, mythologies and phenomenological experiences.
An example of this type of work is The Sleep of Reason Creates Monsters (2001), first installed at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland, makes reference to Francisco Goya’s famous set of aquatint prints, Los Caprichos, produced between 1797 and 1798.