Upon entering Mithu Sen’s mOTHERTONGUE, 2023, I am met by Un-acknowledgement (2023): a text-based video work meditating on the performance of acknowledging stolen land. The work declares that I am “…kindly instructed to understand it.” I resolve from the outset to oblige. But by design, mOTHERTONGUE is an uncomfortable place where everything is a provocation. A collection of cultural and linguistic artefacts, all of which could be connected to one another in an infinite number of arrangements and associations, the exhibition is an expansive exploration of two decades of Mithu Sen’s career, spanning 40 works and 12 new commissions. Curated by Max Delany for the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art (ACCA), mOTHERTONGUE is imbued with a sense of urgency and controlled chaos that consumes the space. Just as the form of the work is sprawling and vast, so too are the themes imbedded in, and agitated by, Sen’s practise. Myths of identity, the pitfalls of linguistic hierarchies, the body as thesite of protest, digital misrule, and the aesthetic of the artist’s persona all percolate here in thematic fluidity.
It is immediately apparent that its creator is a relentless and devoted collector of cultural relics, phrases, iconography, symbolic totems, and digital artefacts, all of which have been brought together here, with disordered order leaving little room for passivity. One of the most works in mOTHERTONGUE is MOU (Museum of unbelonging), 2023. A cornucopia of found objects, MOU is a large, slowly rotating glass cabinet brimming with unusual artefacts of immense symbolic range and form. It is their being placed together in this way that creates their relationship and significance to one another, rather than being bound by any inherent quality. With an all-consuming effect, MOU meditates on the politics of how we recollect history through the cultivation and preservation of archives. In an adjacent gallery, the work that strikes me the most, one piece of the 20-part of Museum piece #4 – (un)drawing, 2018, features a pin placed in the bottom left-hand corner of a clean white frame, bearing the slogan: I LOVE TERROR. Laden with suggestive and proactive symbolism, mOTHERTONGUE demands that you act on more on instinct than instruction.
The most urgent and vital element of mOTHERTONGUE, one that informs the form of the work as well as act its thematic core, is language. Sen’s practice asserts that language is not just words but rather the effects of words. Sen uses non-language to respond to the myth that we now live in a post-colonial world, rendering it a political tool to dismantle social orders in favor of new ones that see the patterns and rules of hierarchical English as redundant, reductive, and ill-equipped. This global supremecy of English informed works such as the diagrammatic drawings and directions of UnMYthU: UnKIND(s) Alternatives, 2018, illustrating the irony, error and violence of accepted social structures. Disregarding the formalities of performative politics, it is not only this insistence but the necessity of abandoning language’s rigidity that makes mOTHERTONGUE so compelling.
If we think of the oppressive systems of our social landscape as towering figures, as titans of misused power, then language can be seen as a weapon. Sen’s construction of non-language—realised in mOTHERTONGUE through gibberish; deliberately confused, prefixes; intentional double negatives; and contradictory meaning—blunts these weapons through a process of unbecoming, unmaking, and undoing. There is, for example, Sen’s repeated use of the prefix un, applied without adherence to grammatical rules or expectations. An application of opposite force, the prefix invites anarchy through its negation of accepted realities. Sen’s application of her non-language is felt in every touchpoint of mOTHERTONGUE and used to realise her themes more broadly. In one of the exhibition’s digital works, How to be a SUCKcessful Artist, 2019, a video projected on the wall of the main gallery, Sen offers an instructional on creating yourself as a successful artist fit for consumption. A critique on the one-dimensionality of such a pursuit, Sen speaks in gibberish while a numbered list of caustic rules (written in English “…for your convenience.”) scrolls behind her.
Sen’s use of this un-language throughout mOTHERTONGUE creates what the artist refers to as a ‘glitch’ between the art object (the apparatus) and the human object (the viewer). In the moment the glitch occurs, meaning is undetermined. One’s ability to understand the work and the work’s desire to be understood collide and sputter. Neither the apparatus nor the viewer is in control; the artist has long left the room and all bets are off. It is a contact zone for error, for misunderstanding, for reinterpretation, all of which we mistake as negative or as a failure on the part of the artist, the art, or the viewer. Rather, from where I stand in the room, in the contact zone, at the edge of the glitch, Mithu Sen’s mOTHERTONGUE appears electrified by the potential these interstices create for radical new frameworks and the relief we might find in unmaking the old ones.