Bharti Kher was born in the United Kingdom in 1969 and studied Art and Design at Middlesex Polytechnic London and then received a BFA in painting, with honors, from Newcastle Polytechnic. The daughter of Punjabi immigrants to the UK, she has been based in New Delhi since 1993.

Kher’s artistic practice encompasses all media, with a special emphasis on sculpture. She frequently employs found objects, manipulating them and combining them so as to reflect her own position as an artist located between geographic and social contexts. Her way of working is exploratory: surveying, looking, collecting, and transforming, as she repositions the viewer’s relationship with the object and initiates a dialogue between metaphysical and material pursuits. While much of her sculpture is figurative, Kher also works in abstract and installation modes, flirting with the concepts of the grotesque, the decorative, and the allegorical.

Amongst Kher’s signature materials, loaded with symbolism, is the bindi. First appearing in her work in 1995, she has since inherited its aesthetic and cultural dualities, using it to mix the everyday with the sublime. Kher explains: ‘the bindi to me represents the third eye – one that forges a link between the real and the spiritual/conceptual/other worlds.’ Used to articulate and animate her themes, the bindi acts as raw material, much like paint or clay, but with an inherent narrative linked to consciousness. Used by Kher as pigment, coating, spice, and medication, the bindis undergo a shift in their initial cultural capital, they are defamiliarized, made to seem both scientific and mystical, taking on the attributes of language in the process of translation.

Kher’s recent solo exhibitions include: Alchemies, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2024); Bharti Kher, Arnolfini, Bristol,UK (2022); A Consummate Joy, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2020); Chimeras, Centre Pasqu’Art, Biel, France (2018); Dark Matter, Museum Frieder Burda, Berlin (2017); This Breathing House, Freud Museum, London (2016); Matter, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver (2016); In Her Own Language, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, The University of Western Australia, Perth (2016); Misdemeanours, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2014). Her large-scale bronze sculpture entitled Ancestors was presented by the Public Art Fund at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza, New York City, and on view from September 2022 to August 2023.

Recent group exhibitions include: Uncombed, Unforeseen, Unconstrained, Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello/Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, Venice (2022); Hub India: Classical Radical, Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Torino (2021); Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution, The British Museum, London (2020); Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South, Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation (2020); In the Company of Artists, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (2019); Desire: A Revision from the 20th Century to the Digital Age, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); Surface Work, Victoria Miro, London (2018); Facing India, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg (2018); Like Life: Sculpture, Colour and the Body (1300-Now), The Metropolitan Museum, New York (2018).

Tanya Goel

Mechanisms 11, 2021