Mithu Sen
home, a temporary place
home, a temporary place by Mithu Sen is part of a project called AºVOID. In this fragmented mental map, the landscape is fleeting, embossed, and ethereal; there are moments of recognition and also a near-violent sudden emptying of memory. Bodies are skeletal, nature is in entropy, context is removed. Color is sparse, as if the world of vibrance is slowly being extracted, with only its shadows remaining. Composed of watercolor and graphite on paper, encased in hand-etched plexi-glass, this work plays with light, seeking shadows to disturb the surface of each work, in a challenge of an artwork’s materiality and the presence of the observer on the eventual image that is perceived.
The concept of ‘home’ is in flight and barren; faith and security aflame. The bounty of new life, the ‘womb’ of nature, its flora and fauna in an extinguishing spiral where humans fight for their right to ‘reproduce’, beyond the nurture/nature debates of gender. Here the myths of human survival, the paradigms of social life and its assumptions of identity, of morality, of value, are under scrutiny. The artist refers to the works in this series as “shadow drawings”, spaces where “phantom limbs” linger, where pain is felt but not tangibly located. This work is Sen’s attempt to demythologize the self, to defy the idea that time is linear and thus mappable; playing with the farcity of certainty, of language, of sight.
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.