Mithu Sen

  • Mithu Sen’s writing is central to her practice, as a poet from West Bengal, a region of great Indian literary history, poetic and visual tropes giving ground to her challenge of semiotics. Sen considers her tangible artworks, which range from drawing, installation, poetry, moving image, sculpture, and sound, as by-products of her gestural artistic practice. She believes that performance enables a radical hospitality in ethos and action that embrace all animate and inanimate life. Sen’s artist world is populated by the mythical, the fantastical and the absurd; her studio full of fictional, religious, spiritual, folk-loric characters, materials, and narratives that both challenge and alleviate her frustrations and conundrums in navigating the hegemony of capitalism and its insistence on categorizing, cataloguing, and valuing human labor (under historically destructive extractive, exploitative, often racist means). Her desire to conjure a world that resists assumptions of value according to use, visibility, and its tangible outputs demonstrates a deep empathic awareness of human experience and the limits imposed by exclusively valuing visual evidence, as matter that can be easily circulated, exchanged, and defined. Often incorporating abstracted languages that Sen refers to as “non-languages” or “lingual anarchy”, the artist revels in the undoing of meaning, in the provocation of taboo associated with sexuality, hierarchies of social agency, and presumptions of monolithic identities.

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Mithu Sen

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Mithu Sen’s writing is central to her practice, as a poet from West Bengal, a region of great Indian literary history, poetic and visual tropes giving ground to her challenge of semiotics. Sen considers her tangible artworks, which range from drawing, installation, poetry, moving image, sculpture, and sound, as by-products of her gestural artistic practice. She believes that performance enables a radical hospitality in ethos and action that embrace all animate and inanimate life. Sen’s artist world is populated by the mythical, the fantastical and the absurd; her studio full of fictional, religious, spiritual, folk-loric characters, materials, and narratives that both challenge and alleviate her frustrations and conundrums in navigating the hegemony of capitalism and its insistence on categorizing, cataloguing, and valuing human labor (under historically destructive extractive, exploitative, often racist means). Her desire to conjure a world that resists assumptions of value according to use, visibility, and its tangible outputs demonstrates a deep empathic awareness of human experience and the limits imposed by exclusively valuing visual evidence, as matter that can be easily circulated, exchanged, and defined. Often incorporating abstracted languages that Sen refers to as “non-languages” or “lingual anarchy”, the artist revels in the undoing of meaning, in the provocation of taboo associated with sexuality, hierarchies of social agency, and presumptions of monolithic identities.