Bharti Kher: Always an alchemist at heart
Summary
Bharti Kher’s most extensive exhibition yet in the UK represents different approaches and periods of her career
At Yorkshire Sculpture Park—an international centre for modern and contemporary sculpture in England—Bharti Kher’s Ancestor (2022) looms high. This mother figure with heads of 23 children emerging from her body puts the female form front and centre. The artist had been commissioned to make this 18ft-tall painted bronze work, to be placed at the southeast entrance of New York’s Central Park—it was displayed therefrom 8 September 2022 to 27 August 2023—after she had been recovering from long covid. Thus to her, this figure ended up becoming a symbol of nurturing and refuge, while the multiple heads embodied pluralism and multiculturalism. Kher, who lives between the UK and India, has described the female form in this sculpture as a keeper of memories, and “a vessel for you to travel into the future, a guide to search and honour our past histories".
And now Ancestor forms part of a major solo exhibition, Bharti Kher: Alchemies—her most extensive UK museum presentation so far—which represents different approaches and periods of her career. The works on showcase, created between 2000-24, highlight her ongoing engagement with the notions of identity and gender, particularly the female body and its experience. “She presents the woman as mother, sex worker, monster, warrior, and deity, often hybridised with animals or as avatars of the goddess. Her mythical characters blur the boundaries between humankind, nature and narrative, revealing expansive potential and new meaning," states the exhibition note.
On display, both in the Underground Gallery and outdoors , the sculptures show Kher’s process as she transforms material such as bindis, plaster, sari, bronze, glass bricks, salvaged material, fur and wax into a universe of hybrid creatures. She often goes about research in a meticulous, almost scientist-like manner, bringing this together in works of art that throb and pulsate with life. The artist states in an interview that if she likes a material, she finds out how it functions, and then creates sample after sample. “That’s really half the fun. And out of the sampling emerge work, bits, objects, and that’s how things are assembled with different components. Mannequins are cast in rubber to make moulds but I can also cast in paper or cement or plaster or resin. Material creates the work and vice versa," she elaborates.
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Found objects run like a leitmotif in Kher’s practice, with the artist separating them from their original function and creating new meaning around them. In the Underground Gallery at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, one can see The deaf room (2001-12) made with cuboids after melting 10 tonnes of glass bangles. Created in response to the 2002 Gujarat riots, the work was a statement about the violence against women at the time and the subsequent silencing of female voices. Then there is The hot winds that blow from the west (2011), also a monolithic cube made from old radiators shipped by Kher from the US to India. “We think of winds as harbingers of change, carrying voices of transformation. From where I sit, the winds blowing nowadays from the West are no longer as strong or reliable as they were. Other voices are changing the landscape now and political uncertainties have put the world in flux, economic actions of global markets are more and more causing ecological ramifications elsewhere, feeling evermore precarious," the artist had stated earlier in an interview.
Bharti Kher: Alchemies—supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and the RMZ Foundation, among others—includes four outdoor bronze sculptures such as the new work, Djinn (2024). The Guardian, in its article, dated 27 June, describes the sculpture as a small boy being a tree. “He has a head of bananas and he stands, 5m tall, on a hill at the northernmost point of the park where the sun will light him as it sets and rises and the seasons will alter his patina," states the piece.
Whenever Kher’s works are displayed outdoors, they acquire newer layers of meaning through interaction with the viewers, the play of light and the backdrop. “The viewer completes the artwork and I love that people come so close, are able to touch and interact with them. To put large works in nature is the ultimate test. You can’t compete with nature ever, but you can co-exist," says Kher.
For her, the body itself serves as a site for storytelling, and she has often talked about the skin memories of the materials that she chooses. The final room in the Underground Gallery showcases both the vulnerability and strength of the female form through Six Women (2012-14). This powerful work features plaster casts of sex workers from Kolkata, with the material carrying the essence of these women. “I build narratives, put things on top of each other, attach objects on to works that take you away or lead you in another direction," explains Kher. There is also an animated part of the work that she enjoys, “when the work is its own thing". “Objects and people are all the same in art. The stories and our perceptions are all levelled out in the field as pure experience," she adds. “There is also transfer, the skin becomes a holder of narratives—it is a transfer layer that can hold that meaning," she adds.
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In the same space as Six Women, the viewer can also see the Virus series—featuring a spiral of bindis on the wall—which began in 2010 and will be concluded in 2039. “(It) is a vortex. It’s a peephole. It’s an entrance. It’s an exit. It’s a womb, It’s the abyss," Kher states in her artist note. The other works that form a part of the show include her hybrid forms such as the Intermediaries series and Strange Attractor (2021)—part-ape and part-woman, “harnessing primal, shamanistic energy". In her note, Kher describes her hybrids as “mythical urban goddesses, creatures who came out of the contradictions of femininity or the idea of womanhood" and are, “part truth, and part fiction. Part me, and part you". For her, Intermediaries is a celebration of the weirdness in us and the contradictions in our lives. They embody the reality of our hybridity and the constructed binaries of nationality, religion, class, colour and sex.
Her engagement with the “in-betweens"—as she calls the hybrids and the in-between spaces that they inhabit—has evolved over time. She continues to imagine crevices between identities in multiple ways. “We imitate the shape of the divine to mirror ourselves so that we may feel less insignificant in the greater order of things. In fact, we are so small and our lives are a microcosm in the blip of the churning universe. And yet the way to live the unfathomability of it is to celebrate the wonder of it all," says Kher.
The exhibition is on view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK, till 27 April, 2025
