Mapping the mind of Mithu Sen

New Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen is a powerful and unique voice amongst contemporary artists. She straddles multiple forms of expressions — be it drawing, performance, poetry, moving images, sculptures, installations, sound, and many more, to express her ideas. Born in West Bengal in 1971 and living through times of economic liberalisation as well as the dynamics of a vibrant socio-economic landscape, Mithu defies conventions of language, society, discipline and gender. Instead, she chooses to devise her own language, her own narrative on religion, caste, politics and gender. What makes her works thought-provoking, even shocking sometimes, as she uses hair and blood from her body, is her sheer audacity of showing harsh realities that lie behind stylised exteriors. And therein lies the spine of her oeuvre.

Through her work, Mithu ‘unmyths’ conventional norms of language, geography, gender, socio-economic divides and so much more. As she articulates, “As an artist, I have always felt the need to question the systems that shape how we speak, where we belong, and how we’re seen — whether through language, gender, or class. My idea of ‘unmyth’ is a way to question/resist these inherited rules. It’s not just about breaking old stories, but about challenging the structures that keep them in place. I feel that an artist’s role is not just to comment, but to subvert and interrupt. I don’t aim to give clear answers or easy solutions. Instead, I use strategic subversion, confusion, contradiction, and layered language to disturb fixed ideas and power.”

Her aim, she says, is to playfully questioning the systems that silence certain voices. She does this by using unreadable scripts, gibberish and absurd gestures — not to avoid meaning, but to question who decides what meaning is. “In a world where identity is constantly watched, controlled, and used for profit, I believe artists can make space — not by solving, but by asking uncomfortable, disobedient questions by creating an unfamiliar situation.”

Mithu has participated in many national and international shows and was the first artist to be awarded The Skoda Prize in 2010 for Indian contemporary art. Among her seminal creations over the years is ‘The Museum of Unbelongings’ (2011-2018). It is a recreation of her memories of childhood and abandoned objects like old dolls, toys, photos, furniture and objects from her recollection of her younger days. She questions the politics of preserving history and prefixes belongings with ‘un’ — that has stayed in all her communication — as a symbol of undoing and unravelling the known and the familiar and delving deeper into the root of emotions and ideas.

Her 2014 creation ‘Border Unseen’ is a massive installation made of false teeth and dental polymer that questions the obvious and the not so visible dividing lines among human beings. Another recent series of compelling installations dating to 2023 is ‘Mothertongue’, that shows an illuminated mind-map, along with images and words floating in a galaxy-like space.

Her latest book, ‘Unmyth: Works and Worlds of Mithu Sen’, published by Mapin and supported by Chemould Prescott Road, is akin to a guide into the versatile artist’s mind. As per Mithu, “The traditional artist monograph expects the artist as a fixed subject — someone who can be explained, justified, narrated. I always questioned that format, got bored by myself reading such stories… This book resists that impulse. Rather than narrating a coherent career or offering a tidy retrospective, this work enacts an anti-archive.”

Mithu resists linearity, coherence and the authority of the singular voice. “This book does not really position me as a fixed subject with one skill or one truth. It is not a document of a life lived; it is a way of living thought… Instead of offering chronology, this book is a mind-map of fragments, annotations, marginalia, and performative dialogues. It speaks not through themes, but through forms. Not through answers, but through glitch, pressure, and excess. Language is not a tool of explanation — it is terrain. Unstable. Bleeding.”

Thirteen years in the making, this book was conceived as a performance. “In the book, some questions are riddles. Some answers are refusals. Some voices contradict. Others collapse into noise. This is not a clarification. I do not inhabit the narratives imposed on me,” she adds.

As she deliberately breaks free from set linguistic and grammatical norms and writes poetry and prose in ‘Unmyth’, as also in her other works, Mithu feels, “Usually, books like this have a traditional acknowledgment page, but here, there’s only a QR code from my side that doesn’t lead to a static list of names or conventional credits. Instead, it opens into an evolving digital space — a living, breathing acknowledgment. It resists institutional and normative forms of giving credit by rejecting finality and fixity. It refuses the idea that acknowledgment must be transactional or complete. This is gratitude as performance — poetic, political — not tucked into a footnote, but placed at the very centre. It defies hierarchy. It leaves me a space — for the rest of my life — to remember, to acknowledge, and to keep asking:

Who gets archived? Who gets named?

Who remains unacknowledged despite their deep contribution?

And so, I say: I am nothing, I am only an avowal.”

— The writer is a New Delhi-based freelance contributor

Arts