“FEED ME POETRY”
MITHU SEN, 47, Artist , Delhi
Have you been into a space where you never been actually, never knew or seen...”Always the eternal temptress, Mithu Sen’s work have always tried to collapse the hierarchies of gender, sex and even hospitality. It works in the complex domain of theories such as neoliberalism, counter capitalism, and post modernism but a poet must not cohort with the theorists, and Sen is simply “unbound”. Perhaps you could say she is deconstructing and destabilising almost everything—words, diction, grammar, notions, and assumptions. In conversations, she is demanding: “Feed me poetry” is her way of accessing stories. And in her studio and home in Faridabad and Delhi, respectively, there are thousands of “souvenirs” on display; “wholes and parts” picked up from flea markets and old shops. This is her Museum of Unbelonging (MoU). Sen’s art is nomadic and adventurous in a way that it breaks away from everything. It is also about love and the quest for immortality but like French literary theorist and philosopher, Roland Barthes, she breaks it up, affixes it and anoints them in her own language, which is often called gibberish as she performs with the body and thereby “un-defines” tabooed identities and acceptable modes of interactions.
Her anarchy is manifest in MoU, derived from the name of her sister Mou as a dedication to their childhood memories in transient homes and collected in the museum of unbelonging. These “babies” have their lives and names; it is this induced unsettlement that she aims for. “My personal restlessness and unsettled psychological status; all these collective
ideas and physical materials make my MoU politically sensitive and socially aware,” she says.
Her work is free of site. She believes she is the surrogate mother of these children and in collecting them and bringing them to her home and studio, she is trying to blur the boundaries of the human mind and its limitations. It is her idea of archiving, which is about sensations, and emotions that are collected but not manipulated by either culture or knowledge. Her travels bring her the stories of people and memories and in rearranging, she explores endless compositions. She plays with them; a doll from Saudi can run away with a man from Israel. Most things are ephemeral but in the heart, these encounters stay. In her MoU, these are tributes to a childhood lost in transition, to her own identity that is forever renewing itself based on her medium, which she calls “life”. Sen is always proposing a quasi-history but histories have been mixed and stories are created; among artists working with mixed media, She is the most radical, the most intriguing and unlike many others, doesn’t use “abstraction” or the linear way of responding to queries. She offers herself and her stories freely. Museum of Unbelonging, which is her most intriguing work, she says in her concept note, is a personal archive with no space in official history, abandoned, impermanent toys and unusual belongings, drawn together. There is a little Pinocchio that hangs from the ceiling. But that’s his name in the books. She got him in Switzerland. She has another name for him or she can make up a name. We can’t verify memory; she is in control of it. She can take us to her world. The artist, a poet at heart who is dismantling language itself to make a dream language that can only be felt or experienced now returns after a hiatus of eight long years with a solo exhibition called UnMYthU, which is essentially the physical remnants of her 20 years of performance, which opened at Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road gallery on January 31. Through this exhibition, she focuses on “exploring human relationships” by inverting established modes of interactions to (un)void a space of inbetweenness, revealing complex hidden layers of the mind and senses that inform human behaviour. The output in the format of drawing, poetry, sculpture and installation are byproducts of her performances. She waits, as a poet and a surgeon, to rearrange memories and reactions.