ART-PREVIEW:Bharti Kher-Points De Départ, Points Qui Lient

Bharti Kher uses the “bindi”, a mark or dot indicative of the third eye worn by Indian women on their foreheads, as the central motif and a basic building block in her work. Methodically placed on the surface one-by-one to form surfaces, the multi-coloured bindis become texts, codes and maps and a kind of language that the artist refers to a “cell structures”. Kher is also known for her taxonomy of wild and unusual cast sculptures, embellished with bindis, objects of curiously and the readymade as well as her digital photography.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art Archive

In Bharti Kher’s solo exhibition “Points De Départ, Points Qui Lient” at the DHC / ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, is on display a selection of bindi paintings including the “Heriodes” series (2016), which refers to Ovid’s The Heroines. This collection of epistolary poems is written in the voice of the heroines of Greek and Roman mythology, who address and respond to their lost, left, and imagined lovers. An ongoing series of map works that cover and mask Mercator world maps will also be exhibited for the first time. The application of bindis mark, scar, and punctuate territories and borders, questioning the north/south polarities of country and nation, as well as the visual misrepresentations of a European geodesy. Kher’s sculptural practice also makes use of the readymade in multiple ways. Her “portrait sculptures” (2012-2016) are cast concrete pedestals draped with the sari, the unique South Asian garment that is tied and worn from a 5.5-metre length of unstitched fabric. In this instance, the sari becomes the signifier of the personal and the proxy for the absent body. “The night she left” (2011), one of the works in the series, is a reclaimed wooden staircase that Kher marks with a cascade of red bindis. A twisted sari weaves around an upturned chair, evoking the narrative of the work’s title. Also presented is the work “An absence of assignable cause” (2007), an imagining of the anatomic heart of a blue sperm whale, made to scale and enveloped in a skin of bindis. At once the biggest heart in the world and an inquiry of love, this work offers the paradox of seeing with the inner eye into the heart of the other. Bharti Kher’s work underlines the productivity of disparate combinations in disrupting a world that insists on defining human experience and its cultural expressions. Through subtle clues and formal seduction, she explores a multitude of themes including hybridity, the spectrum of the female body, and the nonphysical in the material world. The exhibition also gives us an opportunity to engage with other urgent questions through art: with the contradictions in male/female dynamics; with cultural appropriation and the ways we look at the other; and, essentially, with empathy

Info: DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, 451-465 St-Jean Street, Montréal, Duration: 20/4-9/9/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://dhc-art.org