Mithu Sen positions herself as a trickster figure within the artworld, confronting the audience with the uncanny, awkward, and absurd realities of late capitalism. Sen is a conceptual artist; her material artworks are ‘mere byproducts’ of her larger oeuvre that targets sites of power—language, identity, social relations—in unexpected ways. Sen's project is inherently anti-colonial; she is constantly seeking nonverbal forms that duck under hegemonic appropriation and representation. Her work is unpoetry, unacknowledgement, and essentially UnMYthU, as the titles of individual objects proclaim to their audiences. Following this line of flight, Unlynching: You never one piece (2017) presents a cabinet of awkward objects, one for each year since the partition of India in 1947. In that year, the hasty decisions by the British Empire to leave the Indian subcontinent and redraw the borders according to ethnonationalist ideals left around one million dead in acts of forced relocation, collective lynching, and pogroms. Personal objects left behind, small statues, and timestamps lay testimony to these hasty, chaotic, and, above all, deadly moments that divided a diverse people into singular, enclosed taxonomies couched into the dogma of ethnic ‘purity’. The poetically beautiful and devastating work illustrates the ongoing violence that fractures its coherence. It speaks to the internalization of past colonial trauma in India, while offering a universal lesson on the consequences of its arbitrarily imposed borders.

Work in the exhibition: Unlynching: You never one piece (2017–), installation with bronzes, found objects, broken mirror pieces, QR code, wall drawing, LED light, large glass, paper drawing, violence and textualized time (1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, to be continued), dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist