Artist Mithu Sen goes off-script in her new book

Following the release of her book UnMyth, she speaks to us about her “slippery” relationship with feminism, Global South as a lens, politics of language and more

10 May 2025

Namrata Dewanjee

Are you a feminist? There is hardly a question as divisive as this, curdling a room into a parted montage of eye-rolls and applause. Most people, including myself, are quite comfortable on our chosen sides. That is, until someone questions the sanctity of the lines we draw. In early April, UnMyth: Works and Worlds of Mithu Sen, edited by Irina Aristarkhova, was unveiled at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Published by Chemould Publications in collaboration with Mapin Publishing, the volume traces Mithu Sen’s shape-shifting, two-decade-long practice. Through exhibitions, performances, and word art, she has built an oeuvre that refuses to be contained by genre, institution or language.

Interviewing someone like Mithu, who challenges the popular belief of language not as a tool of clarity, instead using it as a means to dissect meaning, feels especially complex. In a time when movements like “feminism” are both rallying cries and battlegrounds, imploding from within, her practice pushes against the rigidities of language itself, making space for contradiction and chaos. The book explores her foundational ideas: unmything and postmything; radical hospitality; untaboo sexuality; lingual anarchy; critiquing institutions and countering capitalism; unmonolith identity; byproducts and contract. In a provocative exchange, she talks to us about what it means to speak outside the lines and what is revealed when language ceases to behave.

"Feminism, when it becomes a category, a club, a singular script, begins to replicate the very binaries it dreams of breaking" — Mithu Sen

Spread from her new book UnMyth; Image courtesy Mithu Sen

What urged you to release the Unmyth now?

Mithu Sen: If not now, then when?

Given your stance on linguistic anarchy, how do you feel about
“feminism” as a term that can divide opinion?

Mithu Sen: My relationship with feminism is… slippery. Not because I deny its histories or urgencies, but because I resist being held by any fixed identity — artist, woman, feminist — even the ones that come dressed as empowerment.

Feminism, when it becomes a category, a club, a singular script, begins to replicate the very binaries it dreams of breaking: woman/man, victim/hero, inside/outside. I prefer to disturb those lines, to speak in tongues, to cut and glitch the narrative. My body, my gestures, my refusals — they question patriarchy, power, gendered violence — but I do not arrive with the correct vocabulary. I arrive uninvited, often unreadable.

Artwork by Mithu Sen on display at Chemould Prescott Road

When people, including women, don’t identify as feminists, what do you think it says about the complexity of gendered experiences?

Mithu Sen: When someone — especially a woman — says she’s not a feminist, I don’t rush to correct her. Maybe that’s her language of autonomy. Maybe she’s tired of being spoken for. Maybe she’s allergic to the elitism, the Westernness, the academese of it all. I listen to that silence. I hold space for her refusal. Because not saying “feminist” doesn’t mean she hasn’t known violence. Or revolt. Or radical love. I don’t believe gender is a checkbox. It’s a ghost, a code, a wound. A game. A prayer. A scream. I don’t perform feminism — I mis-perform it. If feminism demands a script, I will rewrite it in gibberish. In glossolalia. In glitch.

How do the nuances of intersectionality inform your work?

Mithu Sen: Intersectionality isn’t a theory in my work — it’s the mess I live in. I do not wear it like a badge. I carry it in my fragmented voice, my contradictory forms. I resist essentialism — gender, caste, nation, language — none of these define me. I shapeshift: child, glitch, ghost, animal, lover. I dissolve binaries. I refuse the form you expect. I refuse to explain. I refuse to translate. That too is political — especially when the world keeps asking the brown, femme body to justify, to perform, to represent. My refusal collapses the stage. Who speaks? Who listens? Who archives? Even my acknowledgements — those QR-code echoes—speak of who is remembered, and who erased. Intersectionality lives in the omissions, in the unsaid, in the names that never made it to the label.

I work from the Global South — not as a location, but as a lens. My discomfort is a methodology. My body in an institution is already a performance. Race, class, gender, capital — they are not footnotes in my work. They are the material. They are the rupture. I do not theorize. I live. I play. I unmake. I mis/translate. Intersectionality isn’t a checklist in my work. It’s the terrain I bleed on.