Bharti Kher: Transformative Vision
By Minhazz Majumdar

Bharti Kher is unique among the female artists currently redefining the scope of contemporary art in India. Balancing motherhood with her career, she is distinguished by growing commercial and critical acclaim. While completing a mammoth piece for her upcoming solo show at Jack Shainman, New York, in November 2007, she is also preparing for shows in Milan and Beijing, and at Art Basel in June, her largest work to date, The skin speaks a language not its own (2006), a lifesize bindi-covered sculpture of a sinking elephant, was snapped up by a Swiss collector at a six-figure price.

Yet Kher (see P. 163 & AAP 43, 52) is also notable in that she is “a reverse émigré” who moved to India from the UK in 1992. Just 23 at the time, she was on a visit when she met and fell in love with artist Subodh Gupta (see AAP 48 & Almanac 1), who she subsequently married. It was not an easy transition—Kher found India’s restrictions on female empowerment stultifying. Her work Hirsute (1999-2000), comprised of 351 small oil paintings depicting disembodied moustaches based on photographs she took of men on the streets of Delhi, was her response to the unnerving “male gaze” she frequently encountered.

Kher recalls, “The first few years were quite hard in that I had no career at all and there was very little in terms of an alternative art scene.” However, she and Gupta found themselves in the vanguard of experimental art in India when, in 1997 along with several other artists, they established KHOJ, an alternative space for experimentation and international exchange. Kher explains, “KHOJ came from a need for artists to find a voice and to make things happen for themselves, free of schools and hierarchies.” Although KHOJ has grown immensely, Kher says “its purpose remains the same—as a space for artists to exchange ideas. It is still about the process and not the end result.” The same self-determination and experimentation embodied in KHOJ is also apparent in Kher’s approach to art. Trained as a painter at Newcastle Polytechnic in the UK, she has extended her practice to include collage, sculpture, digital photography, video and assemblage.

Social roles, traditional rituals, gender relationships, popular culture and the changes wrought in contemporary India by consumerism and globalization all feed Kher’s creative output. She says, “I like language and its relationship to the visual realm, the way you can contradict or negate the very image you are presenting through the act of naming it.” Consider Or the great Indian rope trick (2006), wherein expected allusions to an Indian conjurer’s extraordinary feat have been replaced by a suicidal giraffe hanging from a ceiling fan, entombed in a dark domestic setting rather than roaming in the wilderness. In the same vein, Angel (2004) is a digital print that shows a bare-breasted pregnant woman, her face obscured by a safety helmet, holding a blue-hued bat-winged baby. Kher adds, “There is a lot of narrative in my work...stories that I weave for myself and relationships that develop between each work so that they all becomerelatives to one another, irrevocably linked.”

Kher has adopted the bindi, a symbolic adornment in India, as her artistic signature. Traditionally prepared fresh from pigments and worn ritualistically by men and women in the center of the forehead as a “Third Eye” that sees beyond the material world, today the bindi is reduced to a vinyl stick-on feminine fashion accessory. Kher’s bindi obsession began when she saw a sperm-cell shaped bindi, the ironic coalescence of an essentially male symbol with a predominantly feminine embellishment. In Kher’s hands, the bindi transcends its mass-produced diminutiveness to become a powerful stylistic and symbolic device. She painstakingly sticks bindis one by one onto colored or mirrored wall panels, as well as figurative sculptures, in a meditative process. Arranged in either orderly geometric patterns or organic, teeming masses, the bindis not only create visual richness but also allow for a multiplicity of meanings. There is an element of subversion—in using the bindi so prolifically on varied surfaces, Kher questions both its relevance as a marker of Indian identity and, shorn of its cultural moorings, as a metaphorical Third Eye enlightening the humdrum lives of Indian women today.

From her unique vantage point, Kher has responded to the conundrum of ethnic identity—real and assumed—and the subjectivity of perception and communication by creating a dystopian world peopled with phantasmagoric sculpted creatures, a place where vacuum cleaners covered with fur and bindis morph into exotic dogs (Hungry Dogs Eat Dirty Pudding, 2004) and bindi-encrusted fiberglass elephants fly. Imbued with a strong feminist tone, Kher’s disturbing digital print Feather Duster (2004), portraying an ape-woman dusting an animal carcass, and her mixed-media sculpture Arione (2004), depicting a frowning half-animal half-woman in S&M gear serving up muffins, posit Darwin’s theory of evolution with a scathing denouncement of the domestic tyrannies that circumscribe women’s lives everywhere. In The Girl with the Hairy Lip said No (2004), Kher distorts a genteel tea-party setting by adding broken chinaware, a tea pot sprouting macabre teeth and a hair-lined cup. The mise-en-scène recalls, in one stroke, both the refined English custom of afternoon tea and the often-humiliating bride-viewing tea ritual associated with arranged marriages in India.

Kher’s provocative art hinges on questioning stereotypes, tearing away veils of prudery and hypocrisy in the process. Typical of her shock and awe approach is You are what you see (2002), depicting two copulating dogs. The lusty male is appropriately covered in blood-red sperm-cell-shaped bindis, while the quiescent female’s air of resignation and indifference is mirrored in her dull, dun coloring. But beyond the optical experience follow the questions—do we define what we see? Or are we defined ourselves in the act of viewing? How do we categorize things as beautiful or base? For Kher, art is “not simply depicting reality but transforming objects,” creating in the process new ways of understanding the world around us.