Mithu Sen’s recent mise en scène at Chemould Art Gallery, Mumbai, comprises of provocative, bizarre snippets of the audio, hyperactive texts fused with multifaceted images and sarcastic titles. The show has all the traditional Mithu signifiers—anatomical abstractions, hybrids, political polemic, horrific beauty, and fetishism for fabric, wild cat patterns, and roses. But this time she has gone a bit too far in playing her favorite game of provoking. She has pushed our society’s hottest button, gender anxiety.
Baroque hard boiled dialogues of the two fictional characters, Rum and Vum, with fractured identities but female and male voices, respectively, have assisted in creating the flicker. The protagonists illuminate the ambiguities, contradictions, and complexities that characterize a real person. These are the things that hide in dark corners and harbour their secrets that must be confronted. There could not have been a snazzier and wittier title and subtitle befitting the show with such ambitions—‘Black Candy (iforgotmypenisathome)’. It is the temporal engagement with the works while hearing, reading and visually perceiving them that force us into a role of a voyeur; hovering in an uncomfortable zone we are bounced by everything that is subversive, tabooed and repressed in society. The panache of this experimental format however, lies in the loop by loop twisting and turning of the gaze whilst simultaneously blurring and bridging the great divides, feminine and masculine.
Shrewd irony and female politics is apparent in the wicked framing of Vum as a misogynist and a victim of his own desire, highlighting his cursing, killing, castration anxiety, sadomasochism, sexual phobia, infidelity, engagement with homosexual gay activities and a desire to become maternal man. It is therefore, not the male psyche that excites us but the vulnerability and anxiety of it.
Rum, a sexually phobic protagonist, who drinks blood, likes ‘tall dark handsome’, intakes testosterone- a many-gendered hormone, declares to be androgynous, and goes on expressing the artist’s desire for gender independent culture. Her discomfort with being labelled as a ‘woman’ artist recalls an analogous anxiety of the sub-title, ‘iforgotmypenisathome’.
It is this female voice that gradually spills the beans. Whatever we perceive in the show is Mithu’s politics of representation; the male psyche and gaze have been exploited to feign and disguise her masculine self and the subversive characterizations are at the same time the metaphors for fear, pain, desire, frustration, anger, passion, etc. experienced by the artist herself. Harumph! Aren’t these human experiences inhabited in all of us?
The tools employed to transgress the tabooed are epitomized in the images as well. For instance, in You Owe me!, a diptych with inter-sexual pregnant body on one panel and a body in an act of excreting on the other, the scatological humour is valued as an inspiration to reveal the cultural suppression. The undertone of sadomasochism, another edgy act of popular culture, is throughout but quintessentially visible in works like, RIP- another stomach another time and places the spine on the blade. Aphrodisiac in you taste like pao bhaji also has a potential to evoke.
A splendid originality in Mithu’s art is achieved through a mix of styles, eras and references. Rather than passively incorporating her sources, she engages critically in the notions of copying and repetition. An assimilation of the installation done in 2009, Confession, in the recent show itself has an overtone of repetition but with an undertone of progress in regression.
Thus, ‘Black Candy’, a deliberately hybridized ‘self’ inscribed within different speaking positions and discursive traditions which shift and overlaps, hints at the revolutionary potential of women art practices. It has dark fringes of gender, sexuality and identity, is a blend of feminism, dark humour, psychology and postmodernism, wrapped with multiple meanings. A taste of Black Candy is subjective; after all we chew with our own personal and cultural baggage. However, its infinite layers have the emotive potential to make anyone feel uncomfortable and squirmy.
Black Candy, Mithu Sen, 23 February – 20 March 2010, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai.
Image Courtesy: Anil Rane, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai.
