New Delhi, Feb. 6 -- Last weekend a group of people were blindfolded and led through a path littered with obstacles while a narrator offered mysterious commentary like "If you speak plainly, you are punished" and "If you are dangerous and ask why, you are punished".

Mithu Sen's "trickster performance", What Do Birds Dream at Dusk, cleverly turned the viewers into part of the artwork even as she showed how curated truths and collective denial shape society today. Though Sen was physically absent from the location, Mumbai's Chemould Prescott Road gallery, she was omnipresent in the orchestration of this metaphorical tussle between sight and blindness, control and freedom, reality and perception. Sen calls this the "poetics of instruction a...