Artist Mithu Sen considers life as her muse and her works as a culmination
Artist Mithu Sen painting
It was raining heavily in the afternoon. Sitting under the dim light of Kashi Art Café at Fort Kochi in Kerala, Mithu Sen, an artist from Delhi, was talking excitedly about her upcoming project for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Mithu loves the two-season rain in Kerala. Born in Bengal and educated at Shanthiniketan and the Glasgow School of Art, UK, she is well known for her mixed media works that revolve around sexuality, gender, and other human emotions. However, Mithu doesn’t like categorising her works. An extremely creative person and travel enthusiast, she considers life as her muse and her works as a culmination of her experiences. She believes in projecting real life experience through art. “I cannot point out any single experience that inspired me for a work. But, it is about life,” she says.
Mithu works on a diverse range of mediums comprising drawings, paper, photography, sculptures, audio, videos and installations. Now, she wants to explore more the possibilities offered by technology.For the Kochi Biennale, she will be setting up a site specific installation in Aspin Wall (one of the venues) using sound and images. Interestingly, she has been residing in a government orphanage in Kochi as part of her research. “It would be a complex project dealing with hospitality. I have been living with the inmates of that orphanage for the past few days to know them well.
They taught me how to live, dine and sleep in their way. Language was not a barrier among us. I conversed with them in gibberish language. The experience I acquired from them will be the core theme of my installation in Kochi. I am yet to finalise on the exact mode of installation,” Mithu elaborates. Having organised numerous exhibitions worldwide, some of Mithu’s noteworthy works include Can we Really Look Beyond the Map? (New Delhi, 2000); Unbelongings (Glasgow, 2001), It’s Good to be Queen (Bose Pacia Artist Space, New York, 2006), Black Candy (Bombay, 2010), In house Adoption (Solo show in Singapore, 2012) Border Unseen (Eli and Edy the Broad Art Museum, Michigan, USA, 2014).
In Border Unseen, Mithu used false teeth and dental Polymer to create an 82-foot sculpture suspended from the ceiling to the gallery floor. If Border Unseen deals with the mouth and the feelings of pain and pleasure that it indulges in, Black Candy throws light on the male psyche. “In Black Candy, I turn to the male psyche and gaze, depicting playful and serious images of the intimate lives of men through my perspective.” Mithu has been conferred with the Skoda prize for contemporary art in 2010.
She also has an ongoing whacky project titled Free Mithu Summer Dhamaka which one can get in exchange of a love letter to her. “I want to change the currency factor prevalent in the art scene. Also, it can teach people the value of gifting, friendship and patience via this project. There is no deadline for it. Anybody can join in,” says Mithu, who declares that she never wants to die.
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