Bharti Kher

Born 1969 in London, UK Lives and works in New Dehli, India Working with sculpture, photography and painting, Bharti Kher explores issues of personal identity, social roles and Indian traditions but also from a broader perspective, 21st century issues around genetics, evolution, technology and ecology. Kher uses the bindi as a central motif in her work, transforming the surfaces of both sculptures and paintings to connect disparate ideas. The bindi is a forehead decoration traditionally made with red pigment and worn by Hindu men and women. It represents the ‘third eye’ the all-knowing intrinsic wisdom and is a symbol of marital status. Recently bindis have been transformed into stick-on vinyl, disposable objects and a secular, feminine fashion accessory. In Kher’s work, the bindi transcends its mass-produced diminutiveness becoming a powerful stylistic and symbolic device, creating visual richness and allowing a multiplicity of meanings, including tensions inherent in shifting definitions of femininity in contemporary India. Kher’s early figurative paintings explore a female perspective of modern India's patriarchal society through representations of contemporary Indian interiors. Depicting a pluralism with ancient Indian customs juxtaposed with modern Western values, Kher reveals how, while increasingly receptive to foreign influence, many Indians still remain reverent of their own culture in an overtly conspicuous fashion. This clash of cultures is very apparent to Kher - a British-born child of the Indian Diaspora who has, in contrast to dominant outward migration trends, moved to India as an adult. Recently her panel paintings have been covered with thousands of bindi creating abstract arrangements encoded with patterns of exile, immigration, crossing boundaries and the passage of time. In response to repressions towards women in India, a number of works by Kher denounce domestic tyrannies that define many women’s lives. In The Girl with the Hairy Lip said No, 2004, Kher disrupts a table laid for a tea-party with broken chinaware, false-teeth and a hair-lined cup, at once critiquing both the English custom of afternoon tea and the Indian bride-viewing tea rituals for arranged marriage ceremonies, with reference to Méret Oppenheim’s surrealist fur lined tea cup. Animals are another recurring theme in Kher’s work, serving as a metaphor for the body and transformation. I've seen an elephant fly, 2002, is a hyper-realistic, life-sized fibreglass sculpture of a grey elephant, covered with white sperm-shaped bindis. While in Buddist and Hindu mythology the white elephant is sacred, in the West, it is a metaphor for something frivolous and useless. In I've seen an elephant fly, grey skin is clearly visible behind a white covering, which emphasises the second skin, thereby confusing its identity and value. Kher poses questions about her own complex identity. In The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, 2006 the elephant reappears as a pathos-inducing figure leaving the viewer unsure whether death or recovery is the next stage. This exploration of ‘inbetween-ness’ with an absence of cause and reason are recurrent themes for Kher. In the sculpture Solarum Series, 2007 Kher returns to the natural world. The tree, a potent symbol that appears in ancient mythologies from many cultures Kher uses such references and combines them with contemporary references, likebiological cloning. The branches of Solarum Series bear the heads of hundreds of creatures: a disturbing and dystopic vision of a genetically engineered hybrid. Rebecca Morrild

Bharti Kher An Abscence of Assignable Cause, 2007