Language
Dead Drift
Mithu Sen
This space presents Dead Drift, an immersive installation by Indian conceptual artist Mithu Sen. The title—Dead Drift—suggests the quiet remnants of emotions adrift, a poetic visualization of stillness, residue, and unspoken loss.
At the heart of the work lies a short video titled I Bleed River 2124. Beneath this evocative phrase, scenes of debris, oil slicks, fragmented bodies, and a luminous blue river unfold, composing a “death-scape”—a post-mortem terrain of trauma and memory.
The video draws on landscapes marked by 21st-century war and disaster: Baghdad, Mariupol, Gaza, Myanmar. These sites, stripped of narrative, are reduced to GPS coordinates—rendered as silent points of reference rather than storied places. What remains is not meaning, but the weight of silence.
A line of illuminated cable runs along the floor, connecting video, drawing, and text into a continuous flow—a rhythm between light, image, and quietude.
Of particular note are the eight drawings installed on the wall. Created with ink, pigment, and metal leaf on handmade paper, these works portray veiled faces, bloodied lips, and blurred gazes. Each becomes a vessel of anonymity, pain, mourning, and resistance—a post-verbal gaze left behind in the wake of unspeakable violence.
Dead Drift functions as a field of memory already depleted from the outset, a scorched genesis that gestures toward life after the end. Here, “neighborness” is proposed not through affinity or sameness, but through a shared sensitivity to wounds—an attunement to collective pain.
Through this work, Mithu Sen reinterprets the spiritual and material sensibilities of traditional ink practice, expanding its ethical and affective possibilities within contemporary art. Dead Drift opens up a space where mourning, resistance, and the aesthetics of silence converge.
At the heart of the work lies a short video titled I Bleed River 2124. Beneath this evocative phrase, scenes of debris, oil slicks, fragmented bodies, and a luminous blue river unfold, composing a “death-scape”—a post-mortem terrain of trauma and memory.
The video draws on landscapes marked by 21st-century war and disaster: Baghdad, Mariupol, Gaza, Myanmar. These sites, stripped of narrative, are reduced to GPS coordinates—rendered as silent points of reference rather than storied places. What remains is not meaning, but the weight of silence.
A line of illuminated cable runs along the floor, connecting video, drawing, and text into a continuous flow—a rhythm between light, image, and quietude.
Of particular note are the eight drawings installed on the wall. Created with ink, pigment, and metal leaf on handmade paper, these works portray veiled faces, bloodied lips, and blurred gazes. Each becomes a vessel of anonymity, pain, mourning, and resistance—a post-verbal gaze left behind in the wake of unspeakable violence.
Dead Drift functions as a field of memory already depleted from the outset, a scorched genesis that gestures toward life after the end. Here, “neighborness” is proposed not through affinity or sameness, but through a shared sensitivity to wounds—an attunement to collective pain.
Through this work, Mithu Sen reinterprets the spiritual and material sensibilities of traditional ink practice, expanding its ethical and affective possibilities within contemporary art. Dead Drift opens up a space where mourning, resistance, and the aesthetics of silence converge.