The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

149 ARTISTS Installation views of ‘UnMYthU: Byproducts of Twenty Years of Performance’ at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, 2018 / Images courtesy: The artist and Chemould Prescott Road Born 1971, West Bengal, India Lives and works in New Delhi, India ‘Language imposes a strange and alien logic that tells us not to smell poetry, hear shadows or taste light .’ 1 Mithu Sen challenges conventions of social exchange, undermines codes and recalibrates precepts and hierarchies of interaction. She explores the in-between spaces of social structures, and constructs devices to navigate life through ‘radical hospitality, lingual anarchy, counter capitalism, untaboo sexuality and unmonolith identity’. 2 TheThe UnMYthU project is Sen’s recent body of work that incorporates poetry, social media, exchange, instruction and performance to demonstrate how language and social conventions limit possibilities for expression. Sen grew up speaking Bengali, a language that celebrates poetry and song, and she has written poetry all her life. Once she moved to the Hindi- and English-speaking locale of Delhi, she felt the need to challenge language hegemonies, and so devised ways to ‘unlanguage’ how we interact. Sen experiments with language in a broader social sense, testing accepted rules and using linguistic meanings, codes and syntax as creative and experimental devices. Like poetry, her work plays with the rules of language — using poetic glitches, blanked-out phrases, new lexicons and gibberish — to share feelings, thoughts and experiences outside established modes of communication. 3 She deploys ‘Un’ to explore the voids and anomalies of the in-between, ‘where (un)contructs dwell, waiting to be (un)realised’. 4 She describes the device as ‘a non-language narrative trope, a linguistic tool to (un)layer the possible manifestations of my practice’. With the same kind of (un)logic, Sen similarly disrupts ideas of how we display and value art. Sen describes UnMYthU as a ‘byproduct of twenty years of performance’, which draws on practices and ideas that test the possibilities of making and sharing art. Her works reconceive how art is valued and circulated, and she devises different interactive scenarios, objects for exchange, and propositions in order to ‘create and consume value’. Sen also proposes a series of contracts involving artist, gallery, audience and art object in a (con)temporary art museum context, and invites audiences to ‘co-perform and (un)myth your perception, define your terms and conditions of participation and experience, but under contractual mandatory protocol’. Contracts are embedded in Sen’s works to impose mediations and obligations on the audience, through a changing set of objects, drawings, performances and texts. By removing and replacing objects and artworks, each tactile and sensory manifestation is in a constant state of flux. Dislocations and voids enable Sen and her audience to access the many layers of performance that comprise UnMYthU. For UnMYthU: UnKIND(s) Alternatives 2018 — commissioned for APT9 — a series of large-scale drawings on handmade Kozo paper, together with diagrams and contracts, take the place of objects: The idea of the contract/declaration is (un)mystified in another construct, the narrative unravelling in an (un)continuous progression. The contract and text assume the role of the drawings; its meticulous details and clinical unlayering performing the role of the visuals that have come to (un)define the crux of my practice in the last 20 years. 5 Mithu Sen’s works are eccentrically conceived and playfully executed. She exploits the vulnerability of art and institutional values, and defies static notions of language and the idiosyncrasies of preconceived social systems. Through creating works that are deemed ‘byproducts’, and by exploring the in-between and working with the ‘medium of life’, Sen (de)constructs the familiar and invites us all to co-perform in her (un)world. Tarun Nagesh This essay has been edited by Mithu Sen as a contractual performance between author and artist. Endnotes 1 Mithu Sen, ‘I have only one language: It is not mine’, in Steven Evans and Sunil Gupta (eds), INDIA / Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art , Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam, 2018, p.116. 2 ‘UnMYthU’ [exhibition website], Chemould Prescott Road , <http:// www.gallerychemould.com/exhibitions/forthcoming-exhibition-focus- photography/>, viewed June 2018. 3 Mithu Sen, interview by Uta Ruhkamp, in Ralf Beil and Uta Ruhkamp (eds), Facing India: India from a Female Point of View [exhibition catalogue], Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Hatje Cantz, Berlin, 2018. 4 These quotes are taken from ‘UnMYthU’, viewed June 2018. 5 Mithu Sen, email to the author, 2 June 2018. MITHU SEN