A Wise One, A Warrior

“How can we look at this work and not talk about who produced it?”

Meena Kandasamy writes about the Mithuna couple, a seventeenth-century ivory sculpture of lovers from Tamil Nadu. She unfurls a many-layered narrative built from the images, questions and contradictions the sculpture raises, and shows how caste and class are carved into the object as indelibly as its physical details — complicating the easy associations of love it may evoke.

Refusing any impulse to idealise or exoticise, she connects the carving to personal and political stories that expose who gets to love whom, and how. Setting the intimate beside the institutional, she interrogates decolonisation, restitution and preservation through an astonishing mix of Twitter, academic discourse, poetry and memoir — talking back, forward and sideways with the object.