Abir Pothi founder Nidheesh Tyagi reviews the book Unmyth: Works and Worlds of Mithu Sen, which presents the first comprehensive study of the impactful artwork of Mithu Sen, a major Indian contemporary artist and poet, in all its multiplicity and complexity.
While flipping through the monograph I tried writing adjectives as verbs around the work and descriptions about Mithu Sen.
Mithu Sen’s work is her, which is many of the following things.
Difficult. Probing. Provoking. Curious. Questioning. Disturbing. Thinking. Exploring. Punishing. Daring. Complicating. Transitioning. Confusing. Courageous. Contrarian. Negating. Sloganeering. Intriguing. Battling. Different. Testing. Attention grabbing. Complicated. Experimenting. Violent.
These adjectives came to my mind and became verbs in my own experience. You will have your own verbs as experiential subject to who you are and how you see. Some of it as glass. Some as mirror. And it takes time to process.
And then.
And then, the ‘Uns’ of everything.
As central to her. And in spite of the tyrannies and inanities of double negative sentences we subject ourselves to (For example; It is not as I do not mean that!), her negations take us to newer spaces, thoughts and coordinates of understanding. Stepping across the line. In the process making her viewers party into the idea and act.
Unmyth: Works and Worlds of Mithu Sen emerges not as a conventional artist monograph but as what Sen herself calls an “unarchive” – a deliberate maze that refuses chronological comfort. Published by Mapin with support from Chemould Prescott Road, this comprehensive study represents over a decade of gestation, beginning after Sen’s 2010 exhibition “Black Candy.”
Where she makes all the world’s story as her own and her own as the world’s. Each of her shows would standout as a different experience. But the monograph one can sense the subtext of her approach, the pattern and making of Mithu in her own thoughts and actions. She uses her own body, crafts of the past, the calligraphy of her mother tongue, stories of her childhood, and politics of our present to meet, criss cross, cross pollinate and finally bring something startling out of it.
At the heart of the monograph lie Sen’s five conceptual pillars: Lingual Anarchy, Radical Hospitality, Counter Capitalism, Untaboo Sexuality, and Unmonolith Identity. Each pillar represents a systematic dismantling of dominant structures. Her “Unlanguage” – two decades in development – employs gibberish, nonsensical phrases, and deliberate syntactic errors to subvert English as a hierarchical institution. The prefix “Un” functions as both linguistic tool and philosophical stance, embodying “libertarian freedom in a state of flux.”
She impresses with her sheer grit of picking an idea and giving it a form which is unique in her own way and also universal in its connect through the subject, language of art. She has interviewed herself through the first feminist of the world – Draupadi of the Mahabharata and then modern thinkers like Sudhir Kakkar, which in itself an interesting exercise.
The centerpiece “Fictional Interview” represents Sen’s most audacious formal experiment. Rather than traditional Q&A, she orchestrates a “fictional performative polylogue” featuring five performative voices – Me Too, Meet U, Me Two, Meat U, Myth U – alongside her own. The interviewers span mythological figures like Draupadi and Medusa, intellectual giants like Gayatri Spivak and Sylvia Plath, and contemporary entities like Alexa and Mr. Bean. Sen positions herself as “strategic trickster,” noting that all personalities exist within her rather than as external citations.
Sen’s tripartite framework of “Mything, Unmything, Postmything” provides the book’s conceptual spine. Mything acknowledges the power of constructed narratives – societal norms, gender roles, colonial legacies. Unmything represents active deconstruction, welcoming “chaos, uncertainty, and conceptual freedom.” Postmything transcends mere negation, becoming “a generative, imaginative space beyond deconstruction” that “embraces absurdity, excess, play, and becoming.”
The book’s architecture mirrors Sen’s artistic philosophy. Designed by Anusha Yadav and edited by scholar Irina Aristarkhova, it functions simultaneously as scholarly resource and accessible coffee-table volume. This dual nature reflects Sen’s resistance to categorization – one part maintains traditional academic rigor while another deliberately unsettles established templates through non-linear presentation.
The book’s most innovative feature is its integration of technology through embedded QR codes, transforming static pages into performance spaces. These digital gateways serve as Sen’s acknowledgments to “non-human, ‘un-human’ and human, visible and invisible labour.” Her poetic acknowledgments read like manifestos: “I, mithu sen, hereby acknowledge my deep connection with all mOTHERTONGUEs and D(e)ADS in this earth.” Such passages embody what she terms “acknowledgement-as-performance that refuses finality or fixity.”
This polyphonic approach reflects Sen’s fascination with Kurosawa’s “Rashomon effect” – how single identities fragment when perceived through multiple perspectives. Drawing inspiration from Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, she creates what she describes as “a stage for me as an artist” where “roles glitch and shift” and “confusion is part of the method.”
The theoretical framework provided by contributing scholars – Nancy Adajania, Max Delany, Sushmita Chatterjee, and Karin Zitzewitz – contextualizes Sen’s practice within transnational gender studies and cultural theory. Yet their essays avoid academic colonization of Sen’s work, instead creating breathing room for her radical methodologies.
The monograph succeeds in capturing what Sen calls “poetic rapture” – that space where resistance meets freedom, where meaning multiplies rather than consolidates. Her refusal of retrospective logic creates instead what she terms “different timelines and a mind map.” The result is both personal document and political manifesto, charting not just an artistic career but “a way of living.”
Unmyth stands as essential reading for anyone seeking to understand contemporary art’s capacity for institutional critique and formal innovation. Sen’s decades-long project of “unlearning” offers readers not answers but better questions, not resolution but productive confusion. In an art world often trapped between market demands and academic orthodoxy, Sen’s radical hospitality creates genuine space for transformation.
The book ultimately succeeds in its ambitious goal of being simultaneously archive and performance, resource and provocation. Like Sen’s art itself, it demands not passive consumption but active engagement, inviting readers into what she calls “a conceptual space of becoming.” In refusing to stabilize memory or meaning, Unmyth becomes a living document – one that continues to unfold with each encounter.
Unmyth: Works and Worlds of Mithu Sen
Hardcover – 30 March 2025
Edited by by Irina Aristarkhova (Editor)
M.R.P.: ₹3,500
A journalist by profession, Nidheesh Tyagi is the Co-founder of Abir Space and Abir Pothi. He is a poet and a story teller.
