Mithu Sen
APT9
Born 1971 West Bengal, India
Lives and works in New Delhi, India
Mithu Sen works in a variety of media to explore and subvert hierarchical codes and rules, with particular reference to sexuality, language, the value of art and objects, and experiences of marginalisation. Through various devices and interventions she challenges our standards of social exchange, undermining the codes we come to rely on and recalibrating types of interaction. Her practice incorporates painting, poetry, social media, instructional exchanges and performance to demonstrate how language and social conventions can restrict our capacity of expression. Sen uproots how we display and value art by constructing interactive scenarios, objects for exchange, and propositions to ‘create and consume value’, reconceiving how art is shared and circulated.
Mithu Sen / India b.1971 / UnMYthU: Byproducts of twenty years of performance (installation view) / Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai / © The artist / Image courtesy: The artist and Chemould Prescott Road
Mithu Sen challenges her audiences to explore the in-between spaces of social conventions and interactions. She uses poetry, drawing, objects, text and performance to investigate social behaviour. Sen’s works question and dodge meaning, and with a playful humour, create new possibilities of communication. She employs symbolic and linguistic devices, such as ‘(un)’, to explore social exchange. The artist describes her ongoing UnMYthU project as a ‘byproduct of 20 years of performance’ that draws on her career of making and sharing art.
For APT9, Sen has created a series of large-scale drawings on handmade Kozo paper. These drawings are accompanied by diagrams, recorded performances and instructions that pose directions, questions, contracts and obligations for the audience. Like using ‘(un)’ as a device to open alternate understandings, in a similar manner, Sen explores concepts of artificial intelligence, experimenting with new identities beyond human logic.
UnMYthU: UnKIND(s) Alternatives 2018 (un)myths through the trope of A(I) — artificial intelligence — which (un)creates to allow for access and actualisation of the void where I locate the medium of life. The tactile byproducts that are exhibited and the performance taking place by each entity engaging with the installation are both creations of A(I). The pristine surface layer of the painted paper and the words and numbers floating around the surface together create the space of inbetweeness — a void — where the (un)mything takes place.
