In conversation with Mithu Sen, the artist who wants to 'unmake' everything

Mithu Sen, the artist who wants to 'unmake' everything.
Mithu Sen, the artist who wants to 'unmake' everything. Photo: Bandeep Singh

"Have you been into a space where you never been actually, never knew or seen...

If I give you an address and ask you to come to an address...

What would you expect if you never know that place?

With what kind of expectation or curiosity?" - Mithu Sen

That's how she entices. The eternal temptress Mithu Sen, whose inbetweeness is her medium to explore the (Un) of everything, has always tried to collapse the hierarchies of gender, sex and even hospitality by co-opting all words with "Un" and prefixing almost everything to create an alternative state where she forces static notions, in fact, squeezes out of words by using this "un". Returning after eight long years with a solo exhibition called UnMYthU, which is essentially the physical remnants of the artist's 20 years of performance, which opened at Mumbai's Chemould Prescott Road gallery on January 31, she sought to "(un)present the artist's practice through (un)frequented modes of engagement."

Also read: This award-winning artist draws inspiration from William Blake

Sen is an important name in the contemporary art world. She seeks a an alternative world of a language born out of an "unacceptance of things."

It is all about the politics of myth making and unmything that myth, Sen says.

A time piece hangs, a little porcelain baby crawls to nowhere. Writings, images come alive if you throw light on the frames. There is a certain fragility to the strokes, to the stories.

I am not here to "Uncode" her. This is not a critique. This is a slice of our conversations. A collage of notes and words, a slice of our engagement.

Sen is elusive. She dodges questions. She counter questions. For long, we have exchanged notes on smells, oceans, mountains. A writer must wait in ambush. Must observe from a distance in order to understand the many layers of her narratives.

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It is all in the complex domain of theories like neoliberalism, counter capitalism, post modernism, etc. But a poet must not cohort with the theorists, etc. Sen is simply "unbound" and the impossibilities of formalities is collapsed by the continuum of her "un-languaging" practice that is not hindered by "autocorrect" or editorializing states of being of the world.

"Can we not exchange poetry vs silence?"

You succumb. You answer the questions in the affirmative. If she calls, you must not linger in doubt.

"Can you count time through smell?" she asks.

She writes about the flowers she had been collecting in LA last year. Lilies? No.

Gardenias, she says.

Long ago, before the artist who says she turns purple with love and other emotions, a singer had written about Gardenias.

Where are you?

Black goddess in a shabby raincoat

Where are you tonight?

Cheap purple baby-doll dress

A gardenia in your hair

Much taller and stronger than me

A forbidden dream, a dream, a dream," Iggy Pop sang. But there is the story about a poet called Allen Ginsberg. They say he was Beat Generation who "howled" in his poems.

Artist Mithu Sen.

I attempt to tell her the story of the song. In San Francisco one night, a dark woman, a stripper came along but she went with Iggy Pop's friend. All night long they say America's greatest poet was ogling at her, but Gardenia, the black woman, went with the friend.

They say Gardenias are sturdy, hardy flowers because you see last November when I was in San Francisco, there were no Gardenias.

They say if you got a secret lover, Gardenias can be confession.

"My purple poet, keep the Gardenias for when in winters, in another time zone, you want to send them to a lover you should have the wrinkled, faded Gardenias," I had written back. "Invoke Ginsberg, play the song Iggy wrote, make up lovers and send them Gardenias...You never know who is waiting, who shall reveal and who we shall send the flowers to. That Ginsberg who wrote these lines-'Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?'

You see, someone promised me a cottage once. Bring me Gardenias Mithu- the ones that can defy time so I can send to lost lovers..."

This is how we speak.

And sometimes a message awaits in the inbox. From her.

"The distance between you and the sea
Far from the remains of the day-----," a note from LA.

Cryptic messages at strange hours. But such is the nature of our engagement. There is nothing linear in her art. She tells stories if she feels like it. And I listen, I do what she asks me. I feed her poetry. She feeds me love.

Also read: This Indian woman is challenging dirty taboos through her art

Sen, who wears real and unreal flowers and turns mostly everything upside down, isn't afraid of collapsing meanings. "Unacceptance of 'me' the way I wasthere was a constant comparison or judgement of what I should be.," she says.

She is into breaking up words like Roland Barthes, who in his A Lover's Discourse: Fragments uses enactment of the "discourse produced by the lover" and liberates language from its transactional and descriptive functions and gives it a third possibility, which is expressive by its virtue of structure and its staged utterance just like what Sen does with her work.

Perhaps you could say she is deconstructing and destabilizing almost everything. Words, diction, grammar, notions, assumptions, etc. In conversations, she is demanding. "Feed me poetry" is her way of accessing stories. She makes you think with her invitations to her exhibitions like the one she sent for her LA show last year.

That was when she sent a "transcribed direction of the UNhome by a short time dweller" and said the house had eight bedrooms... "almost all unattended!
The house is around a century old, but looks older. It is on a hill right near the observatory in Hollywood, with a view of the observatory from the back yard and of the city from the front It's a huge house and every corner has a different view. All doors and windows open. They are too many. Nothing to hide."

I didn't make it to LA then.

And in her studio and home in Faridabad and Delhi, respectively, there are on display in the vitrines thousands of "souvenirs" and "wholes and parts" picked up from flea markets, old shops, etc. This is her Museum of Unbelonging. Sen's art is nomadic and adventurous in a way that it breaks away from everything. It is also about love and the quest for immortality but like Barthes, she break it up, affixes it and anoints them in her own language, which is often called gibberish as she performs with the body and thereby "un-defines" tabooed identities and acceptable modes of interactions. Her anarchy is manifest in MoU, derived from the name of her sister Mou in dedication of their childhood memories of transient homes and collected In the museum of unbelonging, these "babies" have their lives and names. It is the induced unsettlement that she aims for.

"My personal restlessness and unsettled psychological status. All these collective ideas and physical materials make my MOU sensitively political and socially aware," she says.

Her work is free of site. She believes she is the surrogate mother of these children and in collecting them and bringing them to her home and studio, she is trying to blur the borders and boundaries of the human mind and its limitations. It is her idea of archiving, which is about sensations, and emotions that are collected but not manipulated by either culture or knowledge. Her travels bring her the stories of people and memories and in rearranging, she is exploring endless compositions.

She plays with them. A doll from Saudi can run away with a man from Israel. Most things are ephemeral but in the heart, these encounters stay. In her Museum of Unbelonging, these are tributes to a childhood lost in transition, to her own identity that is forever renewing itself based on her medium which she calls "life".

Sen is always proposing a quasi-history but histories have been mixed and stories are created and among the artists working with mixed media, Sen is the most radical, the most intriguing and unlike many, doesn't use "abstraction" or the linear way of responding to queries with an artist's way of asking the other to observe the work and interpret. She offers herself, her stories freely. She doesn't quote others and is against biblio. Museum of Unbelonging, which is her most intriguing work, she says in her concept note, is a personal archive with no space in official history, abandoned, impermanent toys and unusual belongings, drawn together. She has personalised these objects by naming them and through these, the artist questions the nature of existence and explores the suppressed in what goes on in creating histories or cultural memories. There is a little Pinocchio that hangs from the ceiling. But that's his name in the books. She got him in Switzerland. She has another name for him. Or she can make up a name. We can't verify memory. She is in control of it. She can take us to her world. She has rejected documentation.

The artist, a poet at heart who is dismantling language itself to make a dream language that can only be felt or experienced.

And for all this while that she has dismantling language, through this exhibition she focuses on "exploring human relationships by inverting established modes of interactions to (un)void a space of inbetweenness, revealing complex hidden layers of mind and senses that inform human behavior. The output in the format of drawing, poetry, sculpture and installation are mere byproducts of her performances. Sen deploys UN as a non language narrative trope."
And she says "Un" is not a negation of anything. It is almost a way into the layers of text, her own obsession with conveying what language can't.

With her prefixing, she is lending contrary meanings. That's her linguistic tool. Her medium, which is confrontational in the most basic of all acts of rebellion - unmake everything.

Sen was born in 1971 in West Bengal and studied painting at Kala Bhavana Institute of Fine Arts at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan.

Her body of work is a reflection on life that she lives. And perhaps, she is among the few who is an unabashed critique of the art world, the market and its inherent politics and offers her work as "counter capitalism" to disrupt the expectations from her. She is ambitious enough to want to break the demand and supply chain system in the art market. But she won't do it from outside, from the periphery but from the inside.

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In her first ever solo called the Drawing Room curated by Peter [Nagy of Nature Morte, New Delhi] she had started "painting the gallery, doing the furniture" and break the perceptions of gallery as a space venerated by artists.

But the most rebellious of her work was the one in New York by the Asia Society, during Asia Week at the Guggenheim where she had been sent a very detailed instruction booklet. She made a film out of the instruction manual and made fun of it via performance in gibberish but at the same time she was trying to ask important questions about existing codes that define artists' behavior that must "perform their identities, inhabit their work", she says.

She published a book of computer glitches saying this was her writing that never took shape outside the glitches. And then, there is yet another question in the inbox.

"I see you liking my text based random on instagram /fb posts, undone words? Unsolved Images? my unpoetrieswhy do you 'like' them? what do they mean to you?I am truly curious and wanting to understand your feelings about them," she had written.

Facebook, Instagram are her playgrounds, her hunting places for material, for stories. She is forever prowling, looking for people, places, contexts.
In her case, it is all material to be decontextualized/recontextualized and reimagined. The bait is there.

And there she waits, as a poet and a surgeon, to rearrange memories and reactions, coding them in her dream language. All is metaphorical. She bears the poetic license. That gives her the freedom to mutate and to undo the myths.

And writers can attempt to compile it all and art critics can use their repertoire to explain her work. But the one who is "unbound and uninterrupted" only offers "un-explanations" and that's what makes her who she is - the Un-doer of all myths.
And because this story is not an attempt at either reportage or a critique but only a collage of conversations with the artist, who is forever seeking words, a little paragraph must be quoted for her sake-

"All that there is, is mine, but none of it in my control. This is my monstrous burden. The boundary of what I am.

And my desire?

Infinite space," from the Jeanette Winterson's Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles. Because she dwells in the void on inbetweenness and that's the space she would make "un-infinite".

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How To Effectively Develop A Good State Of Mind

Everyone wants to improve something in their lives. The most common areas for improvement are personal life or a career. Read this article for some tips on how to use personal development to your benefit.

When dealing with personal development, not making a decision means forgoing an opportunity. You should not fear making decisions even if you do not feel as sure about it as you would like to be. Successful decisions evolve into good instincts. Bad decisions have value though because they are experiences that teach lessons. A wrong choice only ensures that your next choice will be better.

TIP! Discover what is standing between you and your goals. Many people have problems doing this.

Identify what is keeping you from being successful. This seems to be hard from some people. You might not be able to find your weakness, but you can find the way to change them. Your future will look much brighter if you acquire new strengths.

Idea Strikes

Wherever you happen to be, when a great idea strikes your brain, write it down. Carry paper with you everywhere. Whenever an idea strikes, write it down, and when your creative juices start flowing later, you can act on it.

In order to enhance your own self improvement, work on becoming a leader. There are many different facets of leadership, but the one people talk about most is the ability to win friends and influence people. Reflect back on your leadership experiences. Which events had the most impact on the way you live your life? How have those events changed you? How did your leadership skills come into play during those events? By knowing yourself and your motives better, you can more easily integrate into a leadership role with others.

TIP! Don’t just respect people who have power or something to offer you; treat everyone with respect. The way you interact with people, and the respect you show, says a lot about you.

A lot of people want to improve some aspect of themselves, but aren’t sure where to start. This article offers some good starting points, but it’s up to you to use them. Whenever your inspiration begins to wane, revisit these ideas to regain your enthusiasm.


Die casting is a casting process, is the most widely applied, it is characterized by using metal mold cavity to melt under pressure. Compared with other metal casting technology, die casting surface more smooth, more uniform in size, and lower costs. During die casting process, there are some common problems, accuracy will affect the normal use and casting machine, so what are some problems and Countermeasures to solve what? We look together below.

9 problems needing attention in die casting production process and their solutions:

1st question: Hammer stuck

Solution: 1 in production, often measure temperature, avoid hammer head, cylinder temperature is too high; 2 choose high quality, impurity free alloy material, avoid impurities sticking on the hammer head

2sc problems: the injection head stuck in the neck

Solution: the equipment is in normal temperature, and try to turn the hammer, if not rotate, change our cylinder, will remove the hammer. If you want to have a quick solution to the death card, the best is the refueling pot.

3th problem: dozens of mold material can not be hit when the material is hit, and it is necessary to wait for a few minutes to continue to play material

Solution: to see if the head top spot, such as full section gray, the mouth, the nozzle temperature moderate increase, out of time Ju lowered 0.1 to 0.2 seconds, the fixed mould cooling water slightly down.

4th problem: the die casting thin wall parts are easy to crack

Solution: the problem may be a problem with the material or the die opening is not good or improper process parameters, to control the waste ratio of not more than 30%, leaving time should not be too long, each mm wall thickness is about 3S, the top is not long delay, general 0.5-2s.

5th problem is that the material is hard and the tool is easy to wear

Solution: use the raw material ratio, without renewable materials, using special carbide for the production of gem blade

6th question: aluminum casting has black spots when polished

Solution: reduce the concentration of spraying agent, switch to other spraying agent, or extend the blowing time after spraying

7th problem: metal splash in die casting process

Solution: re install the mold, increase clamping force, adjust the die casting machine, make the dynamic and fixed die mounting plate parallel to each other; increase the supporting plate on the moving die, increase the stiffness of the cover plate

8th problem is the appearance of pattern after anodic oxidation of die castings

Solution: spraying, injection oil walking are high-speed switching or improper location of the oxidation tank copper ion content is too high will cause the pattern, so that to make the spraying, injection oil spread evenly, not gathered in the local, or set the high speed switch position, reduce undercasting phenomenon.

9th problem: sticking of die casting die

Solution: check the mold temperature is normal, moderately lower alloy pouring temperature and mold temperature; check demoulding agent ratio is abnormal, trying to replace the release agent, debugging spray polishing position of surface mold, has the nitride carefully polished off the surface to prevent the destruction of the nitride layer, the formation of throw more sticky; 4, improvement of structure design of gating system, avoid liquid alloy continuous erosion cavity wall or core; 5, to modify the mold cooling system; 6, adjust the parameters of die casting process, appropriate to reduce the injection speed, shorten the speed two stroke.

Characteristics and defects of centrifugal casting
Three major standards for Castings

Should pay attention to the problem of die casting and Solutions


What is Yin and Yang?

While we’re on the topic of Chinese medicine and of balance, we have a good opportunity to discuss the concepts of Yin and Yang. Yin and yang is a system of complementary opposites; although they are antitheses of each other, they are not in conflict like, for example, good and evil. Rather, both are necessary in a healthy existence. The value of this concept is using it to balance your own life. Yin and yang can be applied to nature, lifestyle, and diet. The original terms mean essentially “shady” (yin) and “sunny” (yang). While it’s hard to define them any more than that, yin is associated with darkness, nighttime, passivity, femininity, the moon, winter, negativity, coldness, receptivity, softness, grace, etc. Yang is the opposite—light, daytime, heat, summer, masculinity, positivity, aggression, growth, objectivity, hardness, etc. These distinctions apply to human activity as well. Most kinds of work, physical activity, and creation are considered yang. Sleep, rest, reading, and other passive behaviors are considered yin. Men and women are not exclusively yin or yang but contain some balance of each. The whole point of yin and yang is that one is not better than the other, but that they are perfectly equal and mutually dependent. Any time there is too much of one or the other, an imbalanced and unsustainable situation is created.

In American society, yang is emphasized much more than yin. Americans work long hours and take few vacations, and they usually work during their vacations. Our economy is based on constant growth and fears recession. In politics, an aggressive attitude is generally seen as the best. Sleeping, relaxing, reading, mediating, praying, and other passive or submissive activities are seen as ones that we “don’t have time for.” Since yang cannot exist without yin, though, yin still shows up where it can: in television or movie–watching, internet surfing, and drugs: cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, and hard drugs. Drugs are probably the most extreme of all yin substances—they help us to release all the tension built up during the day. However, because they are so extreme, they leave us worse off than before. They exhaust the body rather than soothe it. Not as serious as drugs, but similar to them, are very yin foods, especially sugar and sugary foods like candy, doughnuts, cookies, and ice cream. These foods relax us for the moment by flooding us with energy, but they mess up our blood sugar and put us on a yin–yang pendulum swing. To be healthy, you need to be in the middle of yin and yang—not swinging back and forth.

Many people who have uncontrollable cravings for sugar, snacks, coffee, and so on, would probably find those cravings reduced if they slept more, meditated more, and found other ways to relax. Another strategy is to try moderately yin foods like the aforementioned sweet vegetables and natural sweeteners. Note that one source of yin cravings can be too much yang food (highly salty snacks, deep–fried foods, excessive red meat). Simply observing and acknowledging your cravings and behavior as being guided by a need to create yin–yang balance can be very helpful in all areas of your life.