Poetry gives me space to breathe

In the book, 'Unmyth', artist Mithu Sen describes her art practice as a breaking or unmaking of everything codified

- Avantika Bhuyan

Unmyth: Works and Worlds of Mithu Sen can be perceived in many ways. For one, it reads like a mind map of the Delhi-based artist, highlighting the way she constantly negotiates key concepts of radical hospitality, lingual anarchy, "untaboo" sexuality, counter-capitalism and "unmonolith" identity in her practice. Another way is to view the recently released book like a performance. The viewers could engage with the universe of Mithu Sen by scanning QR codes embedded within the book. These tech gateways act as the artist's acknowledgements for non-human, "un-human" and human, visible and invisible labour, and emotional and intellectual support that has deeply impacted her life.

"I, Mithu Sen, hereby acknowledge my deep connection with all mOTHER-TONGUEs and D(e)ADS in this earth... I acknowledge all wrong spellings and mistakes! Thank you lingual politics, and colonialism!... Thank you tears, wet ontology, and female hysterics, nostalgia and sentiments, thank you, vernacular Unworld, and our mutual emptiness," reads one acknowledgement.

It carries the spirit of poetic instability and performative multiplicity that she embodies in her practice. "This is an acknowledgement-as-performance that refuses finality or fixity. It invites you into a conceptual space of becoming," she says. She performs gratitude as a poetic and political act, not as a footnote but as a centrepiece. "Who gets archived, who gets named, who remains unacknowledged despite deep contribution? This gesture destabilises traditional authorship and places the work in a relational field of co-creation," says Sen.