Mithu Sen, How to Unmake a Paper Boat

How To Unmake a Paper (2019) the second of Sen’s works exhibited here, is a spoof of Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961), which is a three and a half hour soundtrack recording of Morris making a wood cube. In Sen’s work, an origami paper boat is the focus of an unfolding disassembly process that stands in for one of her larger interests—foregrounded in her recent solo show Mothertongue, exhibited at the Australian Center of Contemporary Art—which she calls lingual anarchy. Origami also has a specific set of rules and grammars, and, as such, this reenactment and parody of Morris’s work is a metaphor for the deconstruction of language, with its emphasis on racism and patriarchy.