In a world desperate for coherence, Mithu Sen라이브 바카라 power lies in staying unfinished
Floor-to-ceiling windows spill sunlight across walls covered with inked gestures and interrupted thoughts―some framed, others caught mid-transformation. A long table, littered with brushes, glass jars of pigment, and torn bits of paper, anchors the space.
There are cryptic signs typed in Comic Sans, jewellery made from human hair, and shelves overflowing with books—from Slavoj Žižek라이브 바카라 cultural criticism to The Little Prince. This is Mithu Sen라이브 바카라 studio in Faridabad.
Sen greets us with French press coffee, marmalade-filled chocolates, and the easy warmth of someone who라이브 바카라 known you for years. It quickly becomes clear that this, like all of Sen라이브 바카라 art, is a performance—but not in the disingenuous sense.
Her gestures of hospitality, like much of her work, play with intimacy, presence and power. During her 2006 residency in New York, she explored the idea of radical hospitality, inviting strangers into her studio as co-inhabitants of an evolving artwork.
The line between host and guest blurred; the art existed in the tension of that exchange. For Sen, life itself is the medium. Art, she says, is just the byproduct.
Sen has just released Unmyth, her latest creation, launched at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. She calls it a book, but only for convenience. “It looks like a book, it feels like a book,” she says. “But it라이브 바카라 a trick. It라이브 바카라 a performance between me and the reader.” Drawings, personal essays, a fictional interview, and a labyrinth of QR codes fill its pages, leading to surreal digital landscapes.It also features contributions by Sushmita Chatterjee, Karin Zitzewitz, Irina Aristarkhova, Nancy Adajania and Max Delany.
Thirteen years in the making, Unmyth explores the body, capitalism, surveillance, language, and the human condition through a collection of detritus gathered from performances and residencies around the world. “It라이브 바카라 a disguise,” she says. “Hidden in plain sight.”
To understand Sen라이브 바카라 work, one must understand her vocabulary: a shifting lexicon built around contradiction and slippage. She describes herself as a trickster, borrowing the term from Lewis Hyde라이브 바카라 Trickster Makes This World, a book she returns too often. “Tricksters deal with shame,” she says. “The persona allows us to say things we’re not allowed to say, with humour.”
Her humour is not evasive; it라이브 바카라 a strategy. “As a woman, I found that somewhere, no matter what I said, I felt I wasn’t convincing enough,” she admits. “Even when I said I feel like killing myself, seeing what is happening in Gaza; still, people did not take me seriously. I felt like there wasn’t a way to explain myself, so I became a disclaimer. A trickster.”
Mischief becomes method. Her work, often charged with political commentary, is filtered through cyphers, deconstructed language, and what she calls gibberish. “I’m not an activist,” she says. “All I can do is make jokes, write cryptic poetry, make art and strange, absurd images—and through mischief, trick people into feeling something.”
But the trickster is just one of the many identities Sen inhabits. She explores the deeply pluralistic versions of Mithu Sen—the artist, the trickster, the person—by asking why they must be separate at all. Her work constantly challenges binaries and boxes: unpoetry, unbecoming, unbelonging, umythh.
To “un,” in Sen라이브 바카라 language, is to refuse categorisation—male/female, artist/person, real/fake, sacred/profane. It is not postmodern cleverness, but ethics of fluidity. She has long resisted being fixed in form or category. “The people who want to put me in a box, they call me artist, they call me performer, they call me poet. But these are just the names. I don’t want to be defined by any of these things,” she says.
For her, un is not a negation, nor a form of censorship, but rather an invitation to imagine all the other forms―an idea, person, or object―could take. When she was warned about nudity during a showcase in Kuala Lumpur of her 2019 project 'Stay Politically UnCorrect Forever', she pre-emptively censored her own work with black boxes. “I said customs had flagged my work,” she laughs. “They hadn’t. But I wanted to show how censorship can be used as material.” What might seem like erasure, in her world, becomes a kind of play.
Language itself is something Sen plays with constantly. She explores the many forms unpoetry might take through her use of gibberish—sounds and noises that arrive intuitively, allowing the listener to project meaning or sit with uncertainty.
This, she says, comes from growing up in postcolonial India, where English carried hegemonic power, especially among the elite. As a Bengali speaker, Sen often found herself unable to access certain conversations or occupy certain spaces.
"I work with English, and I do it with great discomfort, because I want to respond to a complicated history, there is labour and struggle in participating in the anglophonic art world," she says.
Gibberish becomes a way for Sen to express the emotional and linguistic dislocation of those moments.
When asked if Bengali is her mother tongue, she replies, “Poetry is my mother tongue.”
Born in West Bengal and raised by a poet, Sen recalls seeing her mother write verses before bed. “She didn’t call it a diary. She called it poetry. That moment she gave to herself; not for the family, not for anyone else; just for her.” Sen spoke her first poems before she could write, dictating lines and sounds to her mother.
“I always wanted to be like her,” she says. “I wanted to find a space in my life where I would be me. I’ll do something for myself. I’ll do something around me. It will be a tribute to my existence, a tribute to being.”
She grew up in homes across West Bengal, moving every few years. “I learned ‘leaving’ before I learned ‘arriving’,” she says. As a child, each departure felt like a quiet loss. “When you leave, you say goodbye to trees, to balconies, to the sky. Because, as a child, I believed even the sky changed when you moved.”
That sense of transience has never left her. Home, to Sen, is an idea, not a place. Identity, something to inhabit temporarily. She sees bodies and humans in the same light—constantly shifting, minute to minute, second to second. “Change is what I always look for,” she says. “There is so much freedom in it.”
These ideas ripple through all of Sen라이브 바카라 work. Museum of Unbelongings, perhaps, distils them best. An ongoing project, first shown in 2011, the installation features a collection of “impermanent and unusual belongings”. There are used combs, worn shoes, scribbled notes, and broken ornaments among other objects displayed in a museumised showcase. Sen describes the work as “a record of a life, a history of a vernacular culture, and a symbolic archive of impermanence”. It invited viewers to consider what it means to carry memory through things, and what happens when those things lose their meaning. The archive was personal, but it was pointedly reflective of Sen라이브 바카라 own hyper-awareness of ephemerality.
After studying at Santiniketan and the Glasgow School of Art, Sen arrived in Delhi with “Rs 6,000 and a dream.” Over time, her work began to ask questions about authorship, about language, about the borders of the self. In her installations and performances, she resists easy definitions, there is a refusal to reduce the self to a static label or the artwork to a single meaning. In her world Identity doesn’t hold,it bends. If it exists at all, it is just another material to be taken apart.
Her process is often solitary. Sometimes with poetry, sometimes with material, but mostly, she works in her mind. That mind, she says, is like a dark room scattered with stars. “Each one is a possibility. I’m just trying to draw the lines, make the constellations.” But she never draws them all the way. They blur, reconfigure and disappear only to be reimagined.
The point is not to complete the constellation—it라이브 바카라 to notice how many there could be.
It is Sen라이브 바카라 radical refusal to resolve, to be complete, that gives her work its power. Her performances, drawings, invented speech, and reimaginings of older works, all testify to this constant motion.
Yet, beneath the irony and the performance, there is something deeply sincere about Sen. “Inside me,” she says, “I just don’t know what. I’m constantly trying to search for something. There is restlessness. I cannot feel at ease in it; I cannot comfort myself from the everyday experience of the unmanifested nature of human violence everywhere. And that discomfort comes out in some way. That is why I act, why I become.”
What remains is not a fixed portrait of Sen, but a trace of someone in motion. A body of work that undoes itself even as it unfolds. In a world desperate for coherence, Sen라이브 바카라 power lies in staying unfinished.
Deliberately. Defiantly. Human.