Join Irina Aristarkhova for a floor talk on Mithu Sen’s new solo exhibition mOTHERTONGUE.
Aristarkhova has written extensively on Sen’s practice and will take the exhibition’s title mOTHERTONGUE as a proposition to discuss the materiality of language and how Sen’s work operates within the concepts of the mother and the other. Connecting the personal characteristic of language acquisition with the political context of speaking for and on behalf of ‘others,’ Aristarkhova will also address the central theme in Sen’s work – hospitality – and its critique, as well as questions that Sen raises about the art world and its institutions.
Irina Aristarkhova is Professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design and Digital Studies Institute of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In her monographs Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2012, Russian translation 2017 Ivan Limbakh Press) and Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contemporary Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Aristarkhova has developed novel feminist approaches to theories and practices of hospitality in philosophy, science, and art. Prior to her move to the US, in 2001-2005 she founded and directed the Cyberarts and Cyberculture Research Initiative at the National University of Singapore that included art+technology+science events and residencies, a library, a database focused on Southeast Asian new media art, and a custom-built studio where she taught her experimental “Cyberarts” seminar/workshop.
