ART CITIES:Paris-Bharti Kher

Born and raised in England, Bharti Kher moved to New Delhi in the early ‘90s, and today, like most of her contemporaries, frequently travels the world. Consequently, the concept of home as the location of identity and culture is constantly challenged in her body of work. In addition to an autobiographical examination of identity, Kher’s unique perspective also facilitates an outsider’s ethnographic observation of contemporary life, class and consumerism in urban India.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo Galerie Perrotin Archive

Bharti Kher’s exhibition “The laws of reversed effort” has an accordion like effect, taking the viewer on different registers. The effect is much like her vast studio in Gurgaon where objects lie in grand chaos, and the mood seems to shift on different floors. The range of materials confounds, because of the alchemical magic that she seems to tease and seduce from odd conjunctions and unfamiliar disparities. There’s nothing seemingly extraordinary about the figures in the sculpture, “Six Women” (2013-16). Frontally nude, and seated, the contours of their breasts and stomachs nestle in mutual comfort, like the folds of time. Their bodies reveal few secrets. Kher uses the “bindi” (A dot indicative of the third eye worn by the Indian women on their foreheads), as the central motif and most basic building block in her work. The artist often refers to her mixed media works with bindis, the mass-produced, yet traditional ornaments, as “Action paintings”. Painstakingly placed on the surface one-by-one to form a design, the multi-coloured bindis represent custom, often inflexible, as well as the dynamic ways in which it is produced and consumed today. The artist is also known for her collection of wild and unusual resin-cast sculptures, embellished with bindis, and her digital photography. In “What Can I Tell You That You Don’t Know Already?” (2013) – mirrors, bindis and stainless steel are like landscapes, pressed flowers, and memory fields. With this exhibition Kher moves from the more graphic content of her sculptures of the past, to an increasingly sophisticated  engagement with a larger world of meaning and material. The seemingly modest work Index, of mark making, draws upon a global atlas where each city is systematically eroded, blackened out, rendered blind. In the silence that now emerges Kher works to create a new language for decoding maps. This engagement with the line continues in a series of drawings.

Info: Galerie Perrotin, 76 rue De Turenne, Paris, Duration: 10/10-23/12/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.perrotin.com