Peter Hill (PH): The work you are currently showing at ACCA displays a fluency with new technologies, as well as ancient myths. It is both visceral and tech-savvy, driven as much by language as by imagery. AI is the new technology on the block. How do you think you will graft it into your own practice, and control it before it, as some say, controls us?

Mithu Sen (MS): In 2019, I started to experiment with Artificial Intelligence (AI). For one project, I changed the data and info on my Wikipedia page: it remained unnoticed, uncorrected for months… making this wiki all the more unreliable!

In UnKIND(s) Alternatives at the Asia Pacific Triennial in 2018, I addressed this vortex of information/misinformation that we are now facing. I explored its relationship to AI, through Alexa, and its significance in eliciting humane responses. I was working at the crossover between collective intelligence and artificial intelligence.

PH: So how would you describe your relationship with AI now?

MS: I like to be constantly defeated by this artistic medium (AI). It suits me because I am not aiming to gain perfect control and accomplishment. The Internet itself doesn’t know where it is going. I like its philosophy of not having a goal—neither the mastery of science nor technology or arts, or culture will help you achieve it fully. 

PH: And what of the broader realm of digital mixed-media?

MS: I am constantly questioning myths, and composing new ones. The pattern of my life and work is always in flux… sabotage, and subversion, are the words I like to play with. 

The art/world is now broadcast, live-streamed, pinned, tweeted, hash-tagged, and boomeranged. This creates a new performative practice with collective aesthetics, ethics, politics, and participants. It adds a new dimension to the reception of my work that is ultimately collective and out of my control. The vast, mostly unknown audience, the marginalised character of their identity suppressed by society and immediate hierarchies, interacts, and reacts on these “democratic” platforms.

PH: In a lifetime of attending, and sometimes taking part in, performance art events, your performance-lecture at the VCA was one of the most moving, absurd, exhilarating, and darkly sublime that I have ever seen. I could tell the rest of the packed lecture theatre was equally moved, confused, and excited. How did you prepare for it? Was it a totally unique one-off intervention into our collective psyches? And perhaps this would be a good time to start talking about your fictional language, and your exhibition’s title mOTHERTONGUE.

MS: yes, it was a unique one-off intervention for this event only, but prepared to compliment/complicate/counter my show at ACCA. The performance does not necessarily need me as the physical performer, but resonates through the interpretations of those who absorb it. I am just a trickster behind-the-scenes. Unlanguage is part of a practice I call lingual anarchy, which aims to expose and destabilise how language—often the colonial remnant of English—functions as a hierarchical institution. My intervention involves raising my own voice with non-language gibberish, using emphatic, non-sense speech, often frustrating those who sought to grasp any straightforward meaning.  Non-language, and the consequent undoing of language, empowers the speaker and disempowers the listeners. Non/un-language in my practice has evolved as a tool to resist the binds of institutional etiquette.

PH: Can you speak a little more generally, please, about your use of Performance Art?

MS: Art always functions on a performative platform. To me, performing within a fine art context that may be interdisciplinary, scripted or unscripted, spontaneous, random or carefully orchestrated, is one of the most challenging and risky processes. Performance art is not one category or movement to me—it is a form of constant happening and becoming. In some ways, performance is about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory and becoming someone else. It reflects the complexities of human societies and generates an understanding for situations that cannot be explained rationally. Actively adopting performance meant greater freedom to experiment, without fear of comparison to my own established art forms, and those art forms also embrace the fact that I am a poet.

PH: And how does the performance we saw today at VCA link to the work in mOTHERTONGUE at ACCA?

MS: The challenge for me is to push performance further, turning the exclusive spaces of art inside out, through self-critique and creative acts of subversion. My real performance starts after the feeding of my ‘physical’ performance on a site. I am performing even in absentia, not to do with my bodily presence, but linked to the cognitive and cerebral. In mOTHERTONGUE, I conceptualised a few thematic ideas. The mind map focused on a few conceptual areas, such as 'Language of Loss', 'Poetics of Instruction', 'Choreography of Control/Directing Light', 'The Considerations of a Contract', and 'Flattening Time'. My goal was to produce a performance that will not require my presence or guidance in person but can become one with the structure of the exhibition itself.

PH: And how does this mesh with “Unlanguage”, and what you call “gibberish”?

MS: “Unlanguage” is part of my previously mentioned practice of lingual anarchy. My interventions involve raising my own voice with non-language gibberish, using emphatic, non-sense speech, often frustrating those who sought to grasp any straightforward meaning.  Non-language, and the consequent undoing of language, empowers the speaker and disempowers the listeners. Non/un-language in my practice has evolved as a tool to resist the binds of institutional etiquette. I put my audience in a situation of being numb and humiliated by their inability to understand and respond to my language. I hope they will meet the limits of their liberal and conventional notions of hospitality, entering into a zone of what I call “radical hospitality”. In this zone, one is forced to find new ways to be with the other who is absolutely alien and undomesticated. It is my take on the situation, through humour, irony, resistance, and denial.

I use non-language to embrace nonsense as a kind of resistance, with no grammatical structure or syntax. It is not able to be immediately decoded. And I can get away with this subversion and making commands on systems/things that won't allow the option of ‘auto correction’.

PH: Like a number of artists from Man Ray to Ashley Bickerton, Damien Hirst, and Billy Apple in New Zealand, your work often comments on the pricing system within the art market, as well as notions of “potlatch”. You play not just with situations but with space and time in your visual interventions, not always to the pleasure of commercial galleries. Can you describe some of these actions?  

MS: Through the unsettlement of Counter Capitalism, I suggest alternate models of exchange. In my continuing project from 2007, Freemithu. I actively produced works of art that were tangible, but not for sale. Instead of offering them for purchase, I gifted them in return for love letters from the audience. The gift and the idea of charitability are both, as I kept encountering them, coded by gender. And charitability is largely a feminine virtue. Moving along with time, in this model, I was also confronted by an extremely capitalist desire for acquisition. The key exception here only being the absence of monetisation. Neither were my works given a monetary value nor did I attempt to anticipate a monetary sum in exchange—but in this absence, I saw a veritable scuffle for the commodity that were my works of art. At the same time, the transnational terrain that Freemithu had proposed in the moment, became an alternative economy with an alternative currency—the love letters.

In my projects, the market becomes a metaphor for myth and vice-versa. Take for instance, one of my recent works to be put up by my gallery for the 2020 edition of the India Art Fair, titled BYEBYEPRODUCTS BUYBYPRODUCTS (2020) which reflected on the mathematics of value assessment. This involved selling a salon of paintings under the offer of 'Buy One Get One Free'. These paintings were made in the image of the most commercially and institutionally demanded “style” of my work. This was an assessment I made informed by deep searches through the artificial intelligence of search algorithms. Through these drawings, I was signposting an initial stage of my work, taking that too in the ambit of practice, and mobilising it to move like an installation in process. The buyers who would seek to buy the work, would—through my contract—be confronted by the overextended metaphor of depression of the market, as well as the commodity form of the art. In making both visible, I offered my work for sale in the same language of lucrative acquisition that makes any item in the market desirable. The artist must capitalise on anti-capitalism. Left/liberal politics are now largely performative and commodified under capitalism.

PH: Finally, I’d like to turn to your notion of “radical hospitality”. Can you please describe what it is and how it relates to your other interests in 'lingual anarchy, untaboo sexuality, and counter-capitalism'?

MS: Radical hospitality is a counter-narrative, it goes beyond mere friendliness to surprise.

Radical hospitality involves deconstructing the roleplay between one and the other and exploring the recesses that inhabit the underside of social norms and imposed etiquettes. This constantly (re)defines otherness. I both question and subvert the institutionalised cultural diktat and playfully (un)draw the line of tolerance that is endemic to human interactions. I am increasingly finding that my conceptual frameworks, or “pillars” as I call them—lingual anarchy, untaboo sexuality, and counter-capitalism—all pour into radical hospitality.