Mithu Sen is a conceptual artist who explores myths of identity, and their intersection with the structures of our world, whether social, political, economic, or emotional and performs her work across mediums to explore hierarchies and conventions with particular reference to ‘myths’ of language, sexuality, market, and marginalisation. Braiding grotesque fiction, personal ephemera, and piercing humour to obscure societal codes, the by-products of her conceptual practice take the
forms of drawings, sculptures, poems, performances, videos, and installations.
Sen works fundamentally as a performer, tangling with the politics of language, disciplining of bodies, conventions of society, and polite impositions of the art world. Known for her provocative, alluring, and playful examination of these hierarchies, Sen is committed to perpetual unbecoming through performative interventions, symbolic and linguistic counter-narratives and intricate territorial tracings.
Sen received her BFA (1995) and MFA (1997) from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, India; and a PG diploma (2001) from the Glasgow School of Art, UK.
Sen has exhibited and performed in major international forums including Sharjah Biennale 15, UAE (2023); sonsbeek 20-24, Arnhem, (2021); APT9-9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2018); Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg (2018); Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (2018); Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2017); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016); Unlimited: Art Basel (2016); Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan, USA (2014); Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014); Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna (2014); Dhaka Art Summit (2014); Tate Modern Project Space, London (2013); Zacheta Museum, Warsaw (2011); and National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2008), among other forums and institutions.
She recently had her major survey show at ACCA, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne in 2023. She was awarded the Skoda Prize in 2010 and the Prudential Eye Award for Contemporary Asian Art – Drawing in 2015.
Mithu Sen, in collaboration with Sanyasi Lohar and his team, brings the Santali script into the landscape of a Santal village in a gesture that is both gentle and defiant. The work is not only a mural on mud walls; it is a reclamation, a reassertion of cultural identity in a world where linguistic invisibility has become a silent form of erasure. The mural draws from a heritage that recalls Santiniketan’s approach to art as public, communitarian, and transformative. It echoes this tradition but speaks in a distinct and deeply personal voice. It is composed of Ol Chiki script, the written form of the Santali language developed by Raghunath Murmu, filling the village walls with symbols that are at once familiar and subversive. It asks viewers to reflect on the quiet violences that erasure enacts on languages and cultures, the generations of forgetting that shape identities in the shadows.
