At a time when a controversy is raging nationally over a BBC documentary, India’s Daughter , on the New Delhi gang rape victim widely referred to as Nirbhaya, renowned artist Mithu Sen’s riveting video installation on the sexual and emotional abuse of minor girls in an orphanage in Kerala is on display at the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale, set to conclude on March 29.
The 42-minute video art, ‘I Have Only One Language, It Is Not Mine’, was shot by the artist without letting the destitute girls know that they were becoming a part of the project. The installation is on display at the main biennale venue, Aspinwall House in Fort Kochi.
The artist was particular about not objectifying the children and the objective was to share their anguish and hope, spontaneity and innocence, vulnerability and rebellion…, said a biennale media release.
She shot the work by living with the minor girls for a month’s time under a fictional name, Mago, her alter ego.
For Ms. Sen, an unscripted performance captured primarily on her home video camera and cell phone camera, through which she engaged with the idea of ‘radical hospitality’, exploring the limitations of language and the possibility of dialogue outside it. ‘Mago’ is a homeless person who speaks gibberish, does not understand the concept of time and is in a state of transit between two unknown places.
“During her stay, Ms. Sen placed herself in the situation as if she and the children themselves were all fictional. The performance was visually documented by the artist, a house mother at the orphanage and the children who intermittently took the camera into their own hands. A video and sound installation assembled from this footage, along with ‘remnants’ of the performance, forms her exhibit,” says Jitish Kallat, curator of the ongoing biennale.
Ms. Sen says the work has two experimental sides through ‘performance’ and ‘technology’. “Creating a fictional character as alter ego and using non-language communication or performance as an anti-violence intervention with emotionally and physically abused young girls in the orphanage, define my work,” she says.
She says that she created a fictional character of her “to help the girls start believing in strangers…they should not lose hope, but with some intuitive acts they should learn the instinct of reacting prompt. As for the performance part, I stayed with the girls by adopting and adjusting to their life for a short period of time. I tried to do an artistic experimentation on a functional home.”
She was extremely cautious about the identity of the children in the orphanage. The faces of the children and the space they occupy remain unidentified in the film.
“I have destroyed all the footage in a creative way. My film is not an ethnographic documentary. It is more like a surreal or fantasy film on a reality set. It was not to document certain kind of logical living; instead, it was to condense their life into a series of small moments. I did not ‘use’ anybody’s innocence; it is an experiment on a functional home.”
