Art of resistance: Mithu Sen is the dark horse of the art world

Mithu Sen is the dark horse of the art world. Even though it has been eight years since her last Indian outing, Sen can hardly claim to have been underground in that interim — having notched up several international solo shows to her credit in Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Michigan, Vienna, Singapore and Taipei, besides a host of group exhibitions, bagging the Skoda Prize in 2010, participating in several discussions on the polemics and politics of art, and scheduled, already, for showings in Poland, Germany and Australia in 2018. The recently ended UnMYthU at Gallery Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai, therefore, was a mere pit stop on a career the artist is charting internationally.

Typical of Sen, it was subversive, humorous, dark and opaque. At the gallery, Sen was in full flow, regaling visitors (and the media) about her work. Sadly (but entertainingly), it seemed to hover like a question mark over most heads. For Sen, while claiming to de- (she would prefer the prefix un-) mystify and de (un-) intellectualise art, ends up doing precisely that. Immersion in Sen’s work comes at a price. You have to let her take charge. She must control your thoughts. Dissension — a byproduct — is allowed, provided you submit to her view.

And what an (un)view it is. Resistance comes naturally to her. Her home site is ripe with lingual anarchy that questions social, sexual and hierarchical positions. Picking up from her theme of undoing the acceptable, she plays with, recreates and remakes words — and thereby provides an involuntary commentary stating her position: undependence, for instance (I’m tempted to follow her style and use unstance), uncaste, uncensor, ungaze, undisplacement, unhomophobia, unrefugee, unhistory, unmemory, unprivate, unclass. Art, her chosen field (unfield?) she questions through her choice of ungallery, unmuseum, unmedium, unlanguage, uncurate, protesting against markets (unmarket), an almost poetic eulogy to imagination (unimagination?) that becomes a hymn to humankind’s current and complex narration. Mithu unmystifies, or hopes to — but isn’t the reshaping of the world order laden with more complexities than the average viewer can deal with?

At the exhibition in Mumbai, Sen had drawn up five (un)contracts signed by advocate Debottam Bose that (un)allowed her to enter into an indenture with viewers over the playful installation and performance pieces that revisited her own space of art and the journey she has taken in the intervening eight years since her last show in India. A skilled watercolourist who works in several mediums, it is difficult to describe her work, leaving it to be interpreted and experienced at an individual level. It is this where Sen’s experiment challenges her own intent, for it institutionalises the explanations, or unexplanations, as she would prefer it. Unintellectualising it ends up, instead, intellectualising it.

How does one eliminate the very space one inhabits? This is Sen’s dilemma. How do you ungallery a gallery when you (un)exhibit there? The relationship is not just deeply entrenched, it is also symbiotic. Art, or (un)art, it does not exist outside the markets even though the intent may not be to create it for that reason, because without patronage it does not exist/(un)exist. Beyond Sen’s “uns”, the debacle centres on art’s very reason. It is here that Sen offers few options. The seditious can only exist if there is an establishment, and (un)art depends on art for its very reasoning and survival.

For all that, her instinct for the dramatic as she navigates between (con)temporary museums and their (un)certain future provides the provocations for us to visit/revisit/(un)visit the concept of art and its relevance to the times we live in. If you can unmystify Sen enough to glimpse that, her work/(un)work would have served/(un)served its purpose.

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Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated