Mithu Sen
30th April to 19th June
Nature Morte, Berlin

The works were created during a residency at the Awagami Paper Factory in Tokushima, Japan, sponsored by The Japan Foundation, for the exhibition “Emotional Drawing,” During her residency in Japan, she was amazed by the strength of the exotic, erotic and neurotic sub-culture of manga (the adult comic books of Japan) and its effects on the homogeneous Japanese society with its super-complex psychology.

It seemed that manga is a fascinating social and psychological release, where suppression and stress give way to an artistic outlet and becomes both a humorous and surreal art form with eccentric extremes. The grotesqueries of sci-fi are always reflective and critical of political and personal situations but also function as an alternative reality, although the embarrassed mass Japanese populace may consider it only as a fantasy!