Join art historian and curator Chaitanya Samrani for a floor talk on Mithu Sen’s solo exhibition mOTHERTONGUE. Sambrani will address Sen’s engagement with bodies, objects and systems. He will investigate how Sen articulates a practice of active resistance to political expectations around belonging within the context of her local, regional, national and international loci. As an internal migrant, a Bengali woman living in New Delhi during times of endemic violence, rapid modernisation and political polarisation in India and elsewhere, Sen essays a carefully considered position of alienation. Through her refusal to subscribe to structures and systems of language, governance and representation that are intrinsically given to violence, Sen produces a powerful critique of aesthetic and political orders that maintain and perpetuate a state of disempowerment.
Chaitanya Sambrani is an art historian and curator living and working on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land in Canberra, Australia. He studies modern and contemporary art in Asia, especially in relation to the politics of tradition, nationhood, and marginality. An Associate Professor at the Australian National University School of Art and Design, Chaitanya teaches courses on modernism and contemporary art in India, Indonesia, China and Japan. His curatorial projects include Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India (Australia, USA, Mexico and India 2004-07); Place.Time.Play: Contemporary Art from the West Heavens to the Middle Kingdom (Shanghai, 2010); To Let the World In: narrative and beyond in contemporary Indian art (Chennai 2012) and All that Arises, a survey of the work of Lao-Australian artist Savanhdary Vongpoothorn (Canberra, 2019). Chaitanya is principal author and editor of At Home in the World: the Art and Life of Gulammohammed Sheikh (2019), and is working on a monograph on the Riding Rocinante project of Tushar Joag (1966-2018) addressing water futures across India and China.
