I met Mithu Sen at her studio on the outskirts of Delhi. Situated on the eighth floor of an elevator apartment building, the space occupies an entire unit—spacious and well lit—and is organized into a living room, a study, and dedicated areas for painting and production. Sen commutes there from South Delhi almost daily, a journey of approximately thirty minutes. The studio functions not only as a site of sustained artistic labor, but also as an index of the discipline and intensity that structure her working routine.
Born in 1971 in West Bengal, India, Sen studied at Kala Bhavan, Visva-Bharati, where she completed both her BFA and MFA in painting. Between 2000 and 2001, she was awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Award and went to the Glasgow School of Art in the UK as a visiting artist. Working primarily as a conceptual artist, Sen operates across a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, poetry, performance, video, and installation. She positions herself as a “trickster,” seeking to unsettle established aesthetic regimes and the power structures that sustain them. Her work is bold and experimental, frequently incorporating elements of violence, eroticism, and the grotesque, while maintaining a precise formal tension and a critical, often subversive edge. Through strategies of exposure, seduction, and disquiet, she mobilizes an elegant yet ironic visual language to interrogate and destabilize conventions of self-representation, gender normativity, and the regulatory frameworks embedded in personal, social, and institutional contexts.
Thematically, Sen’s practice engages consistently with language, sexuality, colonial experience, marginality, and the position of the Global South within contemporary culture. The recurring bodily imagery in her work—genitals, intestines, veins, bones, limbs, and hair—simultaneously evokes the vulnerability and desire of the flesh, while functioning as an ongoing inquiry into power, violence, and identity politics. Her works often take Indian cultural traditions as a point of departure, interweaving them with global popular culture, modern visual idioms, and transnational contexts, thereby sustaining a dialectical and open-ended relation between local experience and global discourse.
A Colonial Critique of “Hyper-Mysticism”
I was particularly interested in Sen’s work UnMansplaining, presented at a collateral event of the 2019 Venice Biennale. The piece responds, with irony, to the long-standing authoritative—and often oppressive—language and posture of Western male art critics. In the performance, Sen appears dressed in red, with long black hair worn loose, a nose ring, and a deep red crescent painted on her forehead—evoking the figure of a possessed woman, or recalling Hindu fierce goddesses such as Durga or Kali.
These highly legible visual elements deliberately activate Western projections of the “exotic woman”—mysterious, spiritual, and endowed with a kind of primordial force. Sen notes that such imagery is immediately recognizable precisely because it is already embedded within perceptual frameworks shaped by colonial history. She neither claims divine authority nor attempts to authenticate any form of spiritual experience. Instead, she deliberately performs this figure, amplifying gesture and affect to generate a condition of misrecognition. In doing so, she brings into view the viewer’s own cultural assumptions and positionality, exposing how regimes of looking are structured within asymmetrical global power relations.
Mithu Sen, UnMansplaining, 2019, Courtesy of the Artist.
Sen explicitly resists anchoring this constructed persona in any specific indigenous religion or shamanic tradition, since such referential grounding risks reinstating the very hierarchies it seeks to unsettle—reinscribing distinctions between “self” and “other,” “higher” and “lower.” Rather, she fabricates a figure that draws from localized cultural imaginaries without being reducible to a fixed origin. This strategy marks a clear political position. Sen does not present herself as a mystic, nor as a spokesperson for any singular cultural identity; instead, she operates as a feminist artist from the Global South who intervenes in colonial residues and interrogates the exoticizing, spectacle-oriented consumption of difference within contemporary art. In this sense, UnMansplaining functions less as a representation of alterity than as a critical device: by staging the exotic, it simultaneously destabilizes the conditions that make such staging legible, compelling viewers to reassess their own location within cultural hierarchies.
Individualized Daily Spiritual Practice
In both her artistic and everyday practices, Sen sustains an ongoing engagement with questions of spirituality, developing a highly individualized and non-canonical mode of practice. She avoids defining it through established religious or doctrinal frameworks; instead, it takes shape as a mode of being realized through artistic labor and embodied states.
For instance, Sen may sit in a chair for hours without doing anything in particular. She does not attempt to determine whether this should be called “meditation,” or whether it belongs to any recognizable spiritual discipline. Yet this deeply restorative condition allows her to momentarily detach from anxiety and unease, entering a state of concentrated and internally cohesive presence.
Mithu Sen, In House Adoption (4), 2009 Courtesy of the Artist.
For Sen, “energy” is not simply a given, but something that requires belief in order to be apprehended. Across both natural philosophy and religious traditions, human beings have consistently sought to relate to forces that resist full rationalization. Within this framework, she understands artistic practice itself as a form of spiritual cultivation: through making, and through sustained immersion in the present, one develops a particular mode of existence. Spirituality, in this sense, is less a method than an ongoing condition of perception.
She notes that such orientations are not unique to her. People engage comparable practices in different forms—whether through visiting temples, mosques, or churches, or through prayer, fasting, and ritual structured by specific times. For Sen, however, these institutionalized and time-regulated forms can become restrictive. She argues instead for an approach grounded in individual autonomy, where one’s understanding of body, mind, and spirit unfolds according to personal rhythms rather than prescribed sites, schedules, or techniques.
Accordingly, Sen does not align herself with any single deity or religious system. She draws selectively from multiple traditions—Hindu figures such as Shiva and Kali, as well as Islam, Christianity, and Taoist thought—approaching them from the position of a researcher and observer, attentive to their ethical, philosophical, and aesthetic dimensions. Although she continues to visit religious sites, this is not an act of devotion but of perception. For her, entering places such as the Ajanta Caves, the Ellora Caves, or other ancient temples is not fundamentally different from visiting a museum: despite their origins in religious practice, they remain, above all, repositories of artistic production accumulated over centuries.
Religion, Patriarchy, and Motherhood
In discussing religion—particularly Hinduism—and patriarchy, Sen avoids reducing the issue to whether religion itself is inherently oppressive. For her, oppression emerges when an ideology becomes institutionalized through hierarchical and exclusionary structures. Patriarchy exemplifies this dynamic: as a dominant system, it continually reproduces and legitimizes inequality.
Religious authority, under patriarchal conditions, often consolidates power by claiming to speak on behalf of the divine, thereby regulating women’s bodies and behavior. For example, prohibitions against women entering temples during menstruation may appear as inherited tradition, yet function as mechanisms of exclusion from both public and sacred domains. While Sen acknowledges their historical context, she argues that once such norms harden into unquestionable systems of control, they not only become susceptible to corruption but also enable fear, difference, and self-devaluation to permeate the lives of those subordinated by them. These hierarchies, she emphasizes, are not divinely ordained but socially constructed.
Within Hindu mythology, female deities occupy an ambivalent position. Figures such as Durga, Kali, and Lakshmi are frequently represented as autonomous and powerful, and are widely venerated; yet the broader narrative structure continues to reflect human social hierarchies. For Sen, the world of the gods mirrors human society: deities marry, reproduce, and form familial networks, and their internal power relations often correspond to existing gendered distributions of authority. The persistent centrality of male gods, in this sense, reflects a long history of male-dominated cultural production.
Motherhood constitutes another culturally sanctified and symbolically charged domain. In Indian religious and cultural contexts, the mother is often invested with a form of elevated moral and symbolic authority. Sen, however, underscores the internal contradiction of this position. While women may be subordinated within marital structures, motherhood is simultaneously idealized and sacralized, associated with selflessness and moral virtue. This dynamic is not unique to India but recurs across cultures. For Sen, such idealization tends to efface the complexity of mothers as individuals, reducing them to emblematic roles.
More broadly, she argues that once any figure—whether mother, political leader, or deity—is excessively idealized, it becomes burdened with collective expectations. These expectations operate as a mechanism of control: those deemed exceptional are compelled to continually demonstrate their value, assuming roles of guidance, sacrifice, or redemption. It is at this juncture that myth and social reality converge, generating a distinct form of political tension.
Sen further emphasizes that the meanings of deities and symbols are never fixed, but are continually subject to reinterpretation. The worship of Kali, for instance, often intensifies in contexts where women are systematically excluded from public life and subjected to strict patriarchal control. Under such conditions, Kali functions as a symbolic site through which female power can be articulated. At the same time, this symbolic economy is inseparable from histories of violence and fear: women who embody strength, knowledge, or resistance have frequently been cast as threats and persecuted as “witches” across different cultural contexts. This mechanism has not entirely disappeared. In certain regions, women who challenge authority or exercise influence may still be labeled as witches or similar names. Nevertheless, Sen identifies with this figure as a residual and resilient sign of female power. Citing a widely circulated feminist formulation—“We are the witches they couldn’t burn”—she frames the act of speaking out as intrinsically political.
Ultimately, Sen conceptualizes patriarchy as a dominant structural logic that exceeds a simple opposition between men and women. While gender inequality remains a central concern, patriarchy is not enacted exclusively by men; rather, it can be reproduced by any group occupying a position of power. Her feminist position therefore extends beyond gendered embodiment to address broader conditions of marginalization, encompassing oppressed communities, nonhuman animals, linguistic systems, and so on.
The Body, Masculinity, and the Beauty of Darkness
Sen situates feminist art within a longer history of engagement with the body—whether through direct bodily performance or through the use of materials such as hair, teeth, and blood, particularly prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. While her early practice likewise took the body as a point of departure, she extended this inquiry toward the male body—an area that has remained largely taboo.
Mithu Sen, Working Class Hero 1, 2007 Courtesy of the Artist.
Several of her series focus on male bodies, male sexuality, and male genitalia. She notes that heterosexual female artists have historically been excluded from openly representing male desire. Contemporary visual culture continues to be saturated with idealized images of the female nude, largely produced under the conditions of the male gaze. Within a social structure where male desire is normalized and female desire tightly regulated, women artists encounter constraints not only in lived experience but also in the articulation of subject matter. Sen’s explicit engagement with male sexuality emerges as a direct response to this asymmetry.
Her intention, however, is neither retaliatory nor reducible to a simple inversion of power. Rather, she attempts to enter the male domain in order to examine how desire, vulnerability, and affect are structured within it. As she points out, men are equally subject to gendered prescriptions—for example, the cultural interdiction against male crying, which suppresses a range of emotional expressions. By foregrounding male sadness, fear, and states of crisis, Sen underscores the condition of male vulnerability.
In this sense, her feminist position is not predicated on antagonism, but on an engagement with vulnerability as a shared human condition. She does not seek to re-aestheticize the male body through a reversed gaze. Instead, she advances what she terms a “beauty of darkness,” in which beauty is not aligned with pleasure, harmony, or idealization. Pain, violence, grief, and tears are equally capable of generating aesthetic intensity. As in film and music, where melancholy and pathology often produce affective resonance, Sen treats desire, repression, and suffering within the male body as constitutive elements in the experience of beauty. Beauty, for her, is indexed to emotional depth rather than affirmative sentiment.
Such a position tends to elicit ambivalent responses. Some male viewers interpret her work as provocative or even humiliating, questioning her legitimacy in addressing male sexuality; others register its affective investment and critical nuance. Sen reads these divergent reactions as indicative of the current conditions of identity politics and exclusionary discourse, in which defensive postures foreclose the possibility of engaging the experience of others through empathy.
Fragmentation and Violence
In Sen’s work, fragmented bodies are not merely stylistic devices but operate as a central strategy for interrogating how identity is recognized, stabilized, and classified. When the body appears only in parts—hands, legs, teeth—its overall coherence collapses, rendering identity unstable and, at times, indeterminate in gender. A hand or a leg does not inherently belong to “male” or “female”; it is precisely this ambiguity that unsettles the classificatory frameworks through which identity is conventionally assigned.
Sen extends this logic of fragmentation to internal structures—eyes, skulls, bones, spinal cords—elements that resist immediate association with social roles or cultural belonging. With the removal of external markers such as skin, hair, clothing, or religious signifiers, the mechanisms of recognizability that identity politics often depends upon are effectively suspended. Fragments no longer function as remnants of a lost whole; rather, they displace the very notion of bodily totality, situating identity within an open-ended, continuously shifting process. In this way, fragmentation becomes a means of resisting cultural stereotyping and the fixation of identity. Within her visual field, saffron ceases to automatically signify Hinduism, just as white caps and beards no longer unequivocally index Islam.
Mithu Sen, In House Adoption (5), 2009 Courtesy of the Artist.
At the same time, fragmentation carries an intrinsic association with violence. The incomplete body inevitably evokes injury, loss, and rupture. Sen is careful, however, to distinguish her use of such imagery from any attempt to reproduce or aestheticize violence. Instead, violence functions here as a critical register. It produces an echo effect, summoning pain and grief while compelling a confrontation with experiences that are often repressed or rendered invisible. In this sense, the act of facing violence may itself constitute a mode of resistance to its continued circulation.
Sen characterizes the affective tonality of her work as “anger” rather than hatred—more precisely, a sustained and internalized anger arising from a sense of helplessness in the face of global crises, including ongoing wars and humanitarian catastrophes. Under such conditions, hatred loses a determinate object; responsibility appears diffuse, implicating humanity as a whole, not least the artist herself. It is from within this contradiction that an unnamed intensity emerges, and violent imagery enters the work as a residual trace of a desire for peace, reconciliation, and the cessation of harm. Anger, in this formulation, becomes a primal mode of protest—directed toward history, toward civilization, and toward the conditions of being human.
From “Representation” to “Collaboration”: On Colonialism and Cultural Appropriation
Sen remains acutely self-aware in her use of Western artistic languages. She does not deny that colonial history and its educational infrastructures have profoundly shaped her formation, nor does she assume that such influences can be cleanly disentangled. For her, the question is not whether Western methodologies can be used, but under what conditions and to what ends.
Precisely because these visual languages are readily legible to Western audiences, they can serve as effective vehicles for introducing critiques of colonial power from within a shared perceptual framework. In this sense, her approach parallels the use of English in anti-colonial theory: a language historically tied to imperial structures is redeployed as a tool for their critique.
Sen also offers a more granular reading of attitudes toward Western culture within India itself. Indian society is organized through multiple, intersecting hierarchies—economic, educational, and cultural—within which the residues of colonial-era elitism remain operative. English, in particular, continues to function as a marker of structural privilege, often determining access to education, cultural capital, and institutional participation.
Mithu Sen, Dance After Depression 1, 2007, Courtesy of the Artist.
Drawing on her own experience, Sen describes how growing up in a milieu that prioritized local language and culture positioned her at a distance from English-speaking elite systems. Upon entering urban environments structured around Hindi and English, this distance translated into a lived experience of exclusion and inferiority. Even with recognition within her own linguistic community, the absence of linguistic capital placed her at a structural disadvantage. This, she suggests, exemplifies one of the more insidious afterlives of colonialism: the ongoing reproduction of hierarchy through language and education.
In addressing cultural appropriation, Sen situates the discussion within the broader frameworks of identity politics and representation. In the Indian context, Dalit and lower-caste artists have historically been spoken for by others, but are increasingly establishing their own platforms and gaining visibility within international art circuits. For Sen, this shift is both necessary and irreversible.
At the same time, she cautions against confining empathy and critical engagement within rigid identity boundaries. The central issue, in her view, is not who is entitled to speak, but how one speaks—whether the act of articulation assumes ethical responsibility and resists the objectification of others. She therefore proposes a shift from “representation” to “collaboration,” foregrounding processes of co-production, dialogue, and negotiation. While such collaborative models remain entangled with market forces and institutional constraints, they nonetheless offer a provisional strategy for countering symbolic forms of colonialism and the পুনproduction of extractive relations.
These considerations point to an ongoing ethical concern: when structural conditions continue to silence certain voices, how might artistic practice bring marginalized experiences into visibility without reducing or overdetermining them? Sen approaches this question with a high degree of self-reflexivity, remaining attentive to the limits and implications of her own position. Rather than seeking to resolve the tension, she incorporates it as a critical dimension of her practice, allowing it to inform her modes of engagement and representation.
Finally, she underscores that decolonial critique operates as a double-edged instrument. While it can illuminate entrenched cultural, economic, and political inequalities, it may also be mobilized in the service of resentment and exclusion. In contemporary India—as in other parts of the world—the past decade has seen a marked shift toward right-wing politics and emergent nationalisms. Such formations often mobilize affect through accusation and antagonism, constructing enemies and redistributing blame. Colonial powers, the West, or imagined external forces become convenient objects of projection, generating new divisions and perpetuating cycles of hostility with long-term consequences. —[SCR]
*“Mystical Feminism Writing Anthology” is a research compilation by curator Feng-Yi Chu, developed through the curatorial research programs of the National Culture and Arts Foundation, including the Production Grants to Independent Curators in Visual Arts and the Project of Visual Arts Criticism. The publication examines the relationship between mysticism and feminism in both theoretical discourse and artistic practice. It features a range of texts, including artist interviews, commissioned essays by researchers and scholars, as well as exhibition and artistic reviews.
**Header Image: Mithu Sen, You Owe me! 2009, Black Candy (Iforgotmypenisathome) series, Courtesy of the Artist.
