MITHU SEN
Unsocial Media
About the work:
In this series of works, I have used my social media posts to create or to see something tangible and then again create stories around it by manipulating and treating each printed one individually…I am not using them as a new narrative, extended ‘byproducts’ of my social media posts…the discomfort of this series of artworks are just being screenshots …but I am not allowing it to say it’s a digital art …am resisting that consideration of thinking these images as digital image art or film cuts …
Social Media is an incomparable tool to speak to people across geographies, immediately, through the un-languages of image and affect. The algorithms and patterns that undergird and pace our virtual interactions invite us to play with and against them. It presents me with the opportunity to both create and undo patterns and projections of static artistic identity. My Instagram posts are an active assemblage, that floats into the digital ecosystem propelled by the algorithm, and its algo-rhythmic tensions, confusing the code. This confusion and breakdown let me navigate through the data surveillance online, not bind myself in folds of self-censorship. These signs that I present are out-of-context, out-of-frame, out-of-sense –– to baffle and enrich the digital matrix and tap into a greater shared subconscious.
It is here, in these possibilities that one can imagine a realm of communication and mutuality that diffuses and distributes language, that parcels language up into codes, and ciphers, that melts the order of poetic structure and yet suffuses poetry in every sign. It creates a collective vernacular vocabulary, a dictionary of subjectivity that keeps shifting its form –– gathering like a cloud, a mass of meanings bursting into precipitation, but always, always flowing into each other.
Mixed media collages and scratch drawings on Digital print photograph
21.5 x 21.5 inches each
Mixed media collages and scratch drawings on Digital print photograph
21.5 x 21.5 inches each
Mixed media collages and scratch drawings on Digital print photograph
21.5 x 21.5 inches each
Mixed media collages and scratch drawings on Digital print photograph
21.5 x 21.5 inches each
Artist CV
Sen performs conceptual and interactive multi-format byproducts which include drawing, poetry, video, sculptures, poetry, sound and others. Her practice manifests human interactions, employing the medium of LIFE to actualize her art production. She pushes the limits of acceptable language, questioning our pre-codified hierarchical etiquettes in society within the politics of tabooed (cultural and gendered) identity, psycho-sexuality, radical hospitality and lingual anarchy.
She has exhibited and performed widely at museums, institutions, galleries and biennales including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; TATE Modern, London; Queens Museum, New York; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, USA; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India; MOMAT and Tensin Museum, Japan; Peabody Essex Museum, USA; S.M.A.K Museum, Gent, Belgium; Palais De Tokyo, Paris; Art Unlimited, Basel; Albertina Museum, Vienna; Kochi Muziris Biennale, India; Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka; Bozar Museum, Brussels; Asia Pacific Triennale 9 Brisbane, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris; Nature Morte, New Delhi and Berlin; Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, etc. Mithu Sen studied in Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, and Glasgow School of Art, UK .Sen received the Skoda Award in 2010, and the Prudential Eye Award in 2015. Sen lives and works in New Delhi, India.
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