A brief history of possession with Mithu Sen

By Sukant Deepak

New Delhi, March 19 (SocialNews.XYZ) "I'm not sleep deprived, just that I don't want to sleep. How can one miss the night? Yes, I am forever restless. Sometimes I might just take out my most precious objects and clean the dust marks. But wait, when that happens, does it not also wipe away a piece of history, in a stroke?

"I play with things, and at the back of my mind, it has its own explanation. Connecting points is important. It's like a block chain thing. I can't give straight jacket answers. People think I am going everywhere -- but there is a word called organic in the dictionary. This year I have decided, whenever a journalist asks me what I am going to do in 2020, I won't answer. I will refuse to give any clues. And yes, I am also tired of the 'surprise' bit. Everyone can keep making guesses."

At her studio in Faridabad, artist Mithu Sen has set the premise. And for the next three hours, plucks word from sentences. Nothing is forced. There are contrasts, there are long pauses.

This Kala Bhavan and Glasgow School of Art pass-out, who was the first artist to be awarded The Skoda Prize in 2010 for Indian contemporary art constantly changes mediums frequently to protect her freedom. She questions if she really wants to master a certain skill - painting, sculpture etc.

"Why this constant need to 'box'? Isn't it important to unnamed? Everything that Wikipedia calls you, let's unsettle that first. The in-betweens, that space, the transition between whatever has happened and whatever is going to come, I belong to that space," she says.

Sen says she is drawing, immersing and then coming out for short breaths. Sometimes it's about going back, and at times forward. "I see the news, which is disturbing. All of us must protect ourselves. These are hopeless times, in so many ways. It's not about individualism, but solidarity," she adds, almost with caution.

The artist, who performed at the Venice Biennale last year ('(Un)Mansplaining') remembers that it was a take on an art writer who had written that she comes across as a possessed woman, of course in a positive way.

"But the whole perception... was so typical. Seeing a woman - big eyes, strong features and open hair. This can be a 'sensation' and my audience may get captivated with the appearance. But that is the politics I am playing. When they see me 'possessed' , that is the moment when I am absolutely conscious. I can feel I am moving around and how people are engaging with me. I use sounds and words that have never been uttered before. I am very conscious about those moments when I am delivering. I am in fact the only spectator and everybody around me is performing."

Sen laughs that she loves the fact that the equation is completely changed in those moments and how empowered, and in control she feels in that space of time.

"They are trying to grasp a familiar word. After the performance someone might come and say, "You said something that means 'dreaming' in my language.

"I tell them but I didn't mean that. That I didn't mean anything. They will be in such a vulnerable position then, seeing themselves drowning, just trying to grab something, even if it is a familiar word. But essentially vulnerable."

Sen's goal is not to create another language, but to start believing in the parallel.

"Otherwise things become too heavy with their own weight. I am trying to redefine everything, with a non-language. It's for the sake of unlearning identity," she says.

Mithu, the subvert... Well she may have not thought so consciously earlier, but there were, right from childhood certain areas within her that carried questions for which there were no answers.

"The very basic 'should'... the expectations. Wait, maybe it's nothing like that. I feel irritated, disturbed that something is majorly wrong ever since we started taking our first steps. And sadly, we are too lazy to question or think about it. I have always felt extremely happy doing something which hadn't been done before by my family or friends. Like how I loved riding the motorcycle when I was 17 years old... much to the horror of even my neighbours. This is something I learnt from my mother --- to be different is not a crime, you might be isolated but it's a beautiful feeling.

"You break certain rules, like my mother deciding to move out of the huge joint family to ensure that the culture there did not override the poet in her, and my father following her. Late at night, after everybody had gone to sleep, she would write poetry under a small table lamp. Poems which would be then posted to little magazines in the morning."

She feels that considering that our way of life is becoming more like a performance, the need for a role play seems to have become become a prerequisite to survive, therefore she must take control.

"You can get pleasure from my role but the moment I understand that this is happening, I will have that power to start controlling -- I can seduce you, I can become an object that will take control of you. That for me is more interesting. That politics, to sting the power, reverse the equation. And when you think you are at the top, I can easily shatter. I won't let anyone hijack my agency. I don't want 'something', I just want to survive and leave at my own terms. We definitely need to break the pattern, politics, power play... we are just consuming."

"There is always some kind of a leader who is playing and we are just listening. We are not even thinking. I want to do everything organically. It's something very personal, but I do feel a transformation, a deeper search or the situation of our time. Sometimes I feel that something may be coming, which we may not be able to handle in the near future."

Sen, a published poet who has been writing for decades, when asked if there is a poem in mind when she picks up a brush or pencil, asserts that she never classifies mediums as what one portrays is a flux of everything.

"I still don't know the answer when someone asks me about my medium of choice. I always reply 'life'. To answer your question, as a tool sometimes, I use poetry, sometimes a visual to convey, sometimes I recite, sometimes it is silence and void. I don't like restricting myself and neither do I have a problem when the world associates me with something particular, after all it suits them to classify. I should not be so inhospitable.

"Well, my ground is radical hospitality and subversion leads to that. I may not be a singer in the strict sense of the word, but when I am alone I start creating sound, may even scream. And it comes back to my ear. Only mine. I am a singer, I am an actor and many more. But above all, I am nothing. I am just living my life, fully conscious about my being, my presence and conscious."

There are also times she feels as if existing in two parallel lives -- immediate issues and politics reflecting in her everyday diary, and the other which she doesn't confuse with spirituality, but acknowledges as a space which we are yet to understand.

"Like Quantum Physics, there are areas and things which we don't know, how should we give them a form or body. And I consider them marginalised areas, almost invisible. Sadly, they always remain isolated, subjected to abuse. You overlook them, and they become the victims. Another aspect is, there are so many areas of existence of the non-existing. But remember, I am not for mysticism, in fact I am against all the 'isms'. I feel the 'thing' and those spaces, slowly merge. And that is the most fantastic feeling of my being."

As we come back to her stand of not revealing her 'future', she laughs: "At the end of every year, Indian and international journalists ask me - What's up for 2020? Such a natural and obvious thing for them to do. I have decided - from now, there's nothing next. I have stopped providing that 'next' thing. The whole assumption and then the expectation... Why give them anything to speculate, because everything is going towards creating a market."

And no, she is not in the favour of all the myth making around her for she has seen how a person is created.

"It's such a bubble. In 2006-2007, there was a boom and I witnessed my works getting ten times more expensive within six months. But when the market crashed, so many of my contemporaries going into depression. So, who are we constantly fooling? In fact, the whole pattern is being served for certain areas."

Precisely why she believes in subverting the market. In the year 2007, the artist gave away her art work for free as part of an interactive art project in which she invited letters from the general public, and gave the writers an artwork. Not to mention, her MoU (Museum of Unbelonging), which is about creating value, not in the sense of the market.

"Yes, and for that, I can go into any kind of extreme -- I play, I literally kind of poke. Now I don't know if I am fearless, but I really don't care. Of course, for three to six months, I have to work for my own responsibilities and I respect the market for that. And no, I won't do multiple production. In the beginning of my career, I realised that by doing that all I can achieve is make another house, a fancy life... but then it is important for me to protect what people call 'middle class Bengali sentiments'... I have a middle path and that is only happening through my own life process and work practice. To counter my own image, my social media accounts promise total subversion."

"For all my text based posts, I collect words at night and play with them, making a collage out of them. Then I see, who are the ones liking it? I inbox the people I don't know - ask them why they like it etc. In this way, I am also trying to find out possibilities of a vernacular language. Everybody comes with an explanation, nothing is defined, it's not poetry. Creating a cryptogram - something is hidden and a few things are exposed. By the way, last year, my performance with Alexa at the The Asia Pacific Triennial in Australia was also like that. I challenged Alexa, speaking with her in English and my non- language. She can be so limiting, she will not answer many questions. But what is the politics behind that?"

Making drawings of her work which she has been doing for the last 20 years, Sen feels that somewhere they are all interconnected and giving her clarity and helping in finding her position -- a glimpse into her own existence at a particular time.

"There are different role plays constantly happening throughout the journey. When we start thinking of the 'why', newer things come up. The politics of life and your times comes in. How you're compared with your mother, or the fair skinned sister? All are lives we have been doing things for a reason... Let's expose them now. When you expose... well, it can be brave, no? That's what I am constantly trying to do - exposing market, sexuality, the feeling of not knowing a language- all this is is much more powerful than taking off your clothes for a nude performance, I think."

(Sukant Deepak can be reached at sukant.d@ians.in)

Source: IANS