Smriti Malhotra
Her art is better experienced rather than read about, she uses her own personal experiences to comment upon the socio-political climate of a space, to reclaim her own self within the linguistic, historical, cultural and sexual contours of society. Her artworks are performative, and sensory, and evoke visual delight and sometimes disgust. This is an essay on Mithu Sen, Shantinikentan’s most Avant Garde Artist in recent times, as stated by Ms Uma Nair, a critic and curator in an article for the Times of India. The contemporary artist is known for challenging the ordinary and the status quo through her artworks, she scribbles her canvases in Bengali poetry, uses her own hair and blood to make a point, speaks in gibberish to un-language herself, she is boundless in her approach towards art.
Mithu Sen has had a lifelong passion for collecting objects and weaving narratives from that, she has opened doors to strangers during her residency in New York. The conversations and interactions that came from meeting these strangers expanded her artwork. Mithu Sen has always turned to performance art when she seeks a break from her usual visual medium, she hasn’t restricted herself to mediums while displaying and making art.
Born in 1971 in West Bengal, she studied at Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati University in Shantiniketan. Her foray into the art world began in the 1990s when she participated in several exhibitions in the country and abroad. She has done various solo exhibitions and solo shows over the course of her artistic career such as ‘Unbelongings’, Machintosh Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, 2001 which was conceptualised during the post-graduation program (visiting) at Glasgow University, ‘Black Candy’ (iforgotmypenisathome) Chemould, Mumbai, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal University, Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi in the year 2010,’ Border Unseen’, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan USA, 2014, ‘UnMYthU | Byproducts of twenty years of performance’, Chemould, Mumbai, 2018, and solo performances such as ‘Lunch is Cancelled’, Shalini Passi Art Foundation, India Art Fair, New Delhi, 2019, and ‘(Un)mansplaining’, Venice, 2019.
Taking an example of one of her unique exhibitions and art creations, she exhibited ‘Museum of Unbelongings’ at the Art Basel which was a fresh perspective on the Cabinet of Curiosities. The lost and found objects were first showcased at the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi in 2011, then at Queens Museum, NewYork and then finally at the monumental show at Art Basel. The miniature museum had no labels and she wanted the viewers and the audience to make their own stories from the objects they saw. She challenged the classical perception of museums, displaying mundane objects that are a part of her personal collection. She displayed objects that represented emotions and sensations that were not collected as a result of knowledge or culture but purely because of the feelings they evoked within the artist. This museum was one of fantasy, and whimsy, and even personifies eroticism. In an exclusive interview with Ms Uma Nair, Mithu states that her heart is a museum of memories, further saying “I think that everything in the world is about desire. But with age and time, our desires change and they become like many fetishes. Each little object in this collection was collected over the years. I call them children. In life, we experience pleasures and burdens according to our attachments and they become a paradox .”
Her two-decade-long artistic journey has had conceptual art pieces, performances laced with personal and collective histories with artworks which are sketches, moving images, visceral installations and the written word. Mithu Sen has broken many notions of reality over the years. As a part of her exhibition ‘UnMYthU: Byproducts of twenty years of performance’ (2018) at Chemould Prescott Road, she gave a spectacular performance with Alexa, which is a virtual assistant technology, a smart speaker. She brings up the Syrian refugee plight within the performance, commenting upon our lack of emotional investment in their plight. In an interview with Rosalyn D’Mello for the Open Magazine, When asked about her transition from a visual artist to a performative one, Mithu says “I have a very definite idea of my identity, as a whole, I see how each moment is performing,” she says, qualifying performance as the consequence of the brain being activated by the self to act out the next moment. “Our mind is working before we act.” This gesture is different from acting because it doesn’t imply either rehearsal or the playing out of a script. “The brain is transmitted into a physical act. The manipulation of your own self and consciousness is an intellect. It is an intellectual way of translating an act from your brain, like absorbing the immediate surrounding and connecting that thing with an outer world—that’s where the whole action happens.”
With ‘Border Unseen’ in 2014 displayed at the Zaha Hadid-designed space of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University. The large sculpture made with dental polymer and fake teeth, she commented upon the concepts of borders, reflecting the cocooned life the elite and a certain section of society have lived so far. The materials used in her artwork are also suggestive of the themes she is commenting upon. The fake teeth and pink stuck-on glue which act as gums are as malleable and shifty as these ‘borders’ we have created in our world. Speaking about this exhibition and the material used, Mithu Sen says “The materiality of my work is marked by a conscious shapeshifting. I don’t define myself or my practice by the material I work with, and so, shifting between the material has been an important tangent of my relationship with matter. I am interested in metaphorical invocations through variegated material, which I delve into, and also expand their meanings. My work with dental polymers, for instance, bears significance because of its intimacy and ubiquity. It is a recognisable form, one which comes with its direct citation of physiognomy, history, and cultural values – myths, lore, superstitions, as well as indexes scales of emotion and affects: taste, pain, and pleasure. Alphabet-like, my teeth-works then become codices carrying a multiplicity of referents, registers, and invocations of body, language, spatiality, and politics.” in an interview with Dilpreet Bhullar for StirWorld in 2020.
Mithu Sen is also known for her use of the written word in her exhibitions, she is also a brilliant Bengali poet who has four volumes of Bengali poetry under her name to date, she chooses to sound over the meaning of the words coming out of your mouth. The disorder of Aphasia plays a personal role in her life, as her father was unable to speak and communicate properly after having a stroke. She made her own language, her own gibberish and urged the viewers of her poetry and her video to also do the same. The language was simply a construct made to communicate, one can communicate in many tongues and sounds without the use of coherent words, it’s for the viewer to decipher and interpret, it is yours and it is personal.
In her performance ‘Aphasia’as a part of Field Meeting: Thinking Practice, at The Guggenheim, an important event in the Asia Contemporary Art Week 2016, she wanted to showcase a language without any borders indicative of her usual themes and ideas on borders, languages and societal restrictions. It was a non-scripted and non-language performance that questioned the supremacy of the English language within the art discourse.
A visceral artist with an expansive artistic trajectory, her palette is ever-expanding and non-restrictive which contains not just poetry, sculpture, installations, objects, caricatures, sketches, artworks, photographs, performance but also personal experiences, provocation, sensory involvement, immersive participation and so much more. Mithu Sen continues to awe-struck her audience with her works of art, her peculiar and distinctive art is a reminder of how powerful art can be and how it can contribute towards an understanding of the world.
