What Do Birds Dream At Dusk: Mithu Sen
Who controls the narrative of seeing?
Who decides which blindness is real?
Who judges what is visible and what must remain unseen?
What Do Birds Dream at Dusk explores blindness not as a medical state but as a political condition—shaped by selective seeing, curated truths, and collective denial. In a world where media edits reality, where militarism frames vision, and where comfort replaces conscience, sight becomes unreliable and blindness becomes systemic. Who controls what we see? Whose suffering remains invisible? What has been erased by design?
The exhibition draws from Pieter Bruegel’s The Blind Leading the Blind—a parable of collective fate, shared vulnerability, and the cyclical repetition of collapse.it culminates in a brightly lit space featuring a large seven-panel reimagining. A move toward catastrophe. The line of bodies stumbling toward a fall echoes today’s political climate: rising right-wing dominance, moral fatigue, disinformation, and the collapse of ethical responsibility. Layered with surreal, real, and speculative imagery, the work reflects the cyclical nature of political blindness and the repetition
of violence across time.
In dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, the exhibition proposes blindness as a generative space—where uncertainty and vulnerability create the possibility of seeing differently. If every drawing, for Derrida, begins from a place of partial blindness, then every society also
navigates from a gap between intention and perception. The works here illuminate that gap.
By integrating Braille, alongside my imaginary scripts (Braille, as a process of pricking the paper from reverse, an act of violence, exposes language itself as political: a site of hierarchy, exclusion, and resistance.) and visual interruptions as counter-language, What Do Birds Dream at Dusk invites viewers to unlearn the visible and confront the worlds that remain unseen.
The journey begins in a darkened chamber where CONTRACT OF UNSEEING:
Acknowledgement of Failure is projected as a declaration of complicity. Black-on-black works and obstructed pathways disrupt the ease of vision. From this darkness, a narrator guides blindfolded visitors through a performative passage—an unsettling tale woven from real moral
failures and collapses of the present.
The Guided Passage — A Trickster Performance
A narrator leads blindfolded visitors through a choreographed route. Their voice tells an “unreal” tale assembled from real current ruptures—episodes where morality failed, where truth blurred into fiction, where blindness became national policy. The performance unsettles certainty, asking
the audience to experience the privilege of sight through its deliberate removal.
What Do Birds Dream at Dusk is not a show about sight; it is an invitation to unlearn the visible. A call to recognise the violence of what has been erased “by design”—and to confront the unseen worlds we continue to shadow.
- Who Unsees the Obvious......
- Who controls the narrative of seeing?
- Who decides which blindness is real?
- Who judges what is visible and what must remain unseen?
