The New Delhi-based artist rails against all kinds of myths and niceties: gender, class, nationality, science, good taste
‘In what language should I attempt to write about lingual anarchy, playful undoings and the exuberant buoyancy in using life as a conduit for art?’ asks academic Sushmita Chatterjee in the first essay of this monograph on the work of New Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen. The question of how to document, capture and comment on the work of a deliberately elusive and anarchic artist, who claimed in a recent interview ‘my discomfort is a methodology’, defines this weighty tome. Sen regards the drawings, sculptures, installations, videos and performances she makes as ‘byproducts’ of her activities, describing herself in one drawing as ‘an Unhuman, Uncensored, Un-national, Unhistoriographer’. Sen’s work rails and prods against all kinds of myths and niceties: gender, class, nationality, science, good taste; whether in intricate, macabre drawings that mash together anatomical dissections of human-animal hybrids with manga-style pornography, or the meta-protest of her installation mOTHERTONGUE (2023), in which she vows to withdraw ‘from charades of inclusion and artifices of language’.
Chatterjee’s answer to her own question, however, appears to be this: with the dry, overexplanatory, quasi-academic language of curating and art theory. This is a remarkably conventional catalogue for an unconventional artist, made up primarily of five sturdy essays from a bunch of institutional curators and academics, offering formulaic, uninspired responses to work that is the opposite. Such plodding exposition plays up the evident contradictions in the endeavour of making a book of academic validation for such an artist. The result is a linear monolith of a book for an artist committed to an unmonolithic identity.
Where’s the anarchy? Sen offers some minor playfulness in a fictionalised interview, responding to questions posed by figures ranging from Hitler and Bhupen Khakhar to Gayatri Spivak. ‘Can you perhaps reflect upon the role of humour in relation to the academic pretensions of the art world and the university?’ she gets Mr Bean to ask. ‘Pass!’ she responds. Sen is right: we need refusals – and new language – to disrupt how we describe and shape the world; we also need new ways to document art, and to share its presence in the long term. This book undoes the un- of Sen’s work, where instead an unmethodology, unresearch, unhistory are needed.
Unmyth: Works and Worlds of Mithu Sen, edited by Irina Aristarkhova. Mapin, Rs 3,500 (hardcover)
From the Summer 2025 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
