Mithu Sen

Sen was born in 1971 in West Bengal and obtained Bachelor's and Master's degrees in painting from Kala Bhavan at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal. Later, she completed a post-graduate program (visiting) at the Glasgow School of Art in the United Kingdom on the Charles Wallace India Trust Award for 2000–2001.[4][5][6]

Sen's Bengali poetry has been published in collected volumes, as well as in magazines and journals since she was a young adult.[7]

Sen’s conceptual practice with a varied set of surfaces, materials, and processes that emerge in the wake of her regular negotiations with her milieu. Her work often deals with the complexities of the body in its physical, basal, erotic and sexless forms. A lot of her works deal with the self as a matrix of identities and myths – questioning societal norms, fixed beliefs, and categorisations.

Sen's material art work, which she calls “byproducts” of her larger process, contrast scale, imagery and genre to problematize existing notions of hospitality, sexuality, communication, and contract. Known for her often erotically and emotionally charged imagery, Sen’s work blurs the line between distance and intimacy, often explored through what she calls “radical hospitality”.

Using the virtual and the real forms of social relation and individual experience, both spontaneous and premeditated, Sen creates work fundamentally as a performer. Many of her performance-based works challenge the notion of language as a proprietary means of communication, attempting to outsmart linguistic hegemonies and codes of propriety by creating an abstract body of gibberish text she calls “non-language”. Non-language, whose use creates moments of what Sen calls “lingual anarchy” employs glitch, noise, sonic affect in its spontaneous creation. Before turning to the aporias of non-communicative language, Sen was a practicing poet in Bengali.

Sen’s recent works extend from the promise of language and community to the legality of contract, opening up questions caught between law and living.

Sen was the first artist to be awarded The Skoda Prize in 2010 for Indian contemporary art. In 2015, she also won the Prudential Eye Award for the Best Emerging Artist Using Drawing.[8]

Her selected exhibitions and projects include:

Sen lives and works in New Delhi. She is an enthusiastic traveller.[1][2]