UnSensored

bY L AKSHMI GANAPAt H y

When it comes to making a statement through art, New Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen has never been one to mince her words. Funnily enough, she does so by doing literally that; sardonic contracts penned in comic sans, the cheeky insertion of ‘un’ into every imaginable crevice of a word, the deliberate, chaotic estrangement of everyday words in glitchy poems. It’s gleeful and reckless. It’s playful and confronting. It’s ‘linguistic anarchy’, and the latest Mithu Sen exhibition from the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) delivers this in spades.

A mULtidiREctioNAL miNd mAp

Structured as an ‘illuminated mind map’ traversing the last two decades of Sen’s career, the exhibition brings works past and present from Sen’s oeuvre into conversation with each other across the surfaces of the ACCA space. The walls surrounding each work are inscribed with text annotations, a kind of non-sequitur footnote from the artist, and a continuous LED strip integrates two decades of provocative work from India’s foremost artist Mithu Sen is on display mOt HertOnGue at the acca provocative and intricate foremost contemporary display in the exhibition acca in Melbourne the architecture of the ACCA space into the experience.

The result is a ‘constellation of images and word associations’ which resist easy consumption, a tangled network of connections immersing you in the multiverse of Sen's practice and demanding multiple visits to fully take in.

“Normally in museums when you see mind maps, they’re linear and chronological, whereas in this case it’s multidirectional,” explains ACCA Curator Max Delany. “Because Mithu’s work spans image, text, sound, language and performance, it really supplants any singular reading with multidirectional and multi-sensory registers.”

“Through footnotes, contracts and use of language, she is involved in modes of direct address to the audience, often in first person singular, not speaking for others, but a position that is very much that of the artist’s voice,” he says.

Post-colonial LiNgUAL poLiticS

Sen’s preoccupation with language began when she migrated from her birthplace in West Bengal to Delhi in 1997 to attend art school. Having only previously written poetry in Bengali, she felt alienated in the cosmopolitan capital, where English and Hindi were the dominant languages and proficiency was associated with social position. This discomfort prompted her to deconstruct the very foundations of language in her works, examining the ways it can be used to gatekeep, isolate and reinforce power structures.

“Of course ‘mothertongue’ is an emotional, sentimental word, but I tried to explore it here through the lingual anarchy position, as a primordial embodied space within our body. It’s a provocation and makes us curious,” said Sen, in conversation at ACCA about the exhibition.

“I still don’t have a mother tongue (or) a language where I feel comfortable. I’m still in search of that bridge. (I’d) say it’s poetry – (something) not always understood but felt.”

The questions posed by mOTHERTONGUE are especially resonant when considering the post-colonial lingual politics of India and the discombobulation colonised people experience in the face of lingual domination outside of the subcontinent. Her 29-minute-long video work I have only one language; it is not mine is one work exploring this dislocation, Sen adopting the character of Mago who converses in a made-up dialect to Malayali orphans.

“It’s a post-colonial situation, you can see [India] has never had a national language - we use Hindi but most of South India refuses to speak this,” she said in the same interview. “The hegemony and hierarchy of these lingual politics around our social platforms is quite hardcore for me.”

A middLE fiNgER to thE ARt woRLd

Within the international art world, nondominant cultures are often presented as decontextualised or exoticised, and there is an expectation that artists from the global south create and behave a certain way.

Sen’s work delightfully and riotously contracts and mind-mapping are a form of choreography which frames Mithu’s work within her own terms and her own language. On the one hand, she’s interested in artistic agency and the direct address of the artist, but on the other hand, she’s resistant to simple interpretation.”

R AdicAL hoSpitALity oN StoLEN LANd

Perhaps the most ironic provocation towards the museological canon is found Museum of unbelongings), a haphazard assemblage of trinkets, many of which could just as easily be displayed in your living room glass cabinet, but which now languidly carousel around inside a giant circular museum vitrine.

The carnivalesque spectacle endowed to sentimental, mundane objects which Sen has amassed over the years is a powerful stab at what is considered ‘fit for display’ in museums and invites reflection on museums repatriating objects stolen from cultures around the world. It’s a statement that’s pertinent to the Australian audience, who are the first in the world to see such a retrospective of Sen’s work.

ruptures this expectation and rebels against the power structures which dictate ‘acceptable’ art. It’s aggressive, visceral, sensual, and political – things which brown women don’t often ‘get to be’. How to be a SUCKcessful artist engages directly with this idea; a gibberish instructional video explaining with delicious brevity how artists from the global south can ‘maximise their impact’ through satirical tropes.

Equally disruptive is Sen’s graphic preoccupation with the body. Beauty and viscera are juxtaposed in pieces such as Until you 206 and BYEBYEPRODUCTS!! BUYBUYPRODUCTS!! the latter of which is ‘awash in virulent red’, a violent yet intimate meditation on her ‘signature style’. The notion of the artist who puts their blood, sweat, and tears into their work is literally manifested in Unbelongings, an embroidery of Mithu’s own hair, and personal and political collide in Ephemeral affair, the artist’s penetrating gaze teetering between emotional suppression and colonial subjugation.

“Working very closely with the artist to centre the artist’s voice was very critical,” says Delany on navigating these fraught expectations. “The annotations,

“There’s a lot of interest in Mithu’s work here,” says Delany. “I think her engagement with colonial histories, questions around language, colonialism and post-colonialism, and the baggage and questions around identity are also questions which are very much at the heart of contemporary Australian practice at the moment.”

“We’ve had wonderful engagement with the show; a lot of people are spending a lot of time with it and coming back for return visits, and lots of rich conversations have resulted.”

Whether it’s the Un-acknowledgement that begins the exhibition, or the contracts declaring the terms of reference and engagement next to each piece, mOTHERTONGUE constantly twists the relationship between spectator, institution, and artist, and this ‘radical hospitality’ as Sen calls it, has startling polysemy.

It's art that unsettles, that’s difficult to define, that figuratively and literally deconstructs perspective through it’s ‘un Sensored’ approach.

Sen herself best captures this sentiment in conversation with ACCA: “Everyone should admit and acknowledge those erased and hidden points that we see but don’t see. Until something is said to our face, we don’t see it, we are blind.” mOTHERTONGUE is on display at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), 113 Sturt Street Southbank, until 18 June 2023.

Ihad a lot of misconceptions about India before I moved there to work as a teacher.

Let me list these for you, and then I’ll share how I realised I was wrong about them all!

I didn’t think there would be much western music, and everyone would listen to Bollywood. There are lots of pubs and clubs (especially in Bangalore where I lived) that play western music, and even karaoke nights with western rock, pop etc. My (Indian-origin) husband used to sing in a band that played western commercial music in 5-star hotels in Chennai. There’s a radio station in Bangalore that only plays western music. During my six years in Bangalore, Metallica, Bryan Adams, INXS, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, Guns N Roses, David Guetta and more played concerts. I learned that the local music is not just Bollywood. In fact, each state has its own music and film industry like Kollywood