#mithu sen

A poet publishes four volumes of poetry. A poet conceives of the reach and the limit of words. In choosing sound over meaning, the poet subverts hegemonic compulsion, hyper-signification, opting for all that can be communicated through feeling.

Aphasia facilitated through a father, who, after a stroke, found himself not quite able to speak.

Sound became a substitute for meaning. Inflection became a semantic structure. Visual nonsense with a quasi-script.

I am a Poet. ‘Word. Sound. Power’

I subvert the political gesture of meaning-making and linguistic hegemony.

That is to say that I ask readers to evolve their own non-sensical interpretation of my computer-generated visual gibberish.

Record your imagination. That is a book of poems.

No one but you speaks this language.

It is yours to read, to decipher, to interpret, and to understand.

Attached to a tongue, a poet prefers personal vocabularies and not the universal.

- Imaad Majeed, April 4, 2017

Mithu Sen at Palais de Tokyo

A New Delhi-based artist who stands as a crucial feminist voice in contemporary Indian art. Sen rose to prominence in the last decade for creating sensual and grotesque representations of the human body, animals, and inanimate objects that seethe with undercurrents of irony and wit. (from http://broadmuseum.msu.edu/exhibitions/mithu-sen-border-unseen )