BHARTI KHER: THE PEOPLE WATCHER
This story was originally published in Platform magazine for its April-October 2022. Cover photograph: Bharti Kher in her studio. Photo: Tuhin Chandra. Courtesy: Platform magazine.
Bharti Kher’s atelier in a residential setting in Gurugram is an expansive building with a sci-fi-esque exterior of glass and concrete, which is oddly made invisible by the surrounding foliage. There is a good chance of unwittingly driving right past it. In the inner sanctum of Kher’s studio are gravity-defying installations, sculptures, bare-chested human castings, a cabinet of tiny figurines, a quadruplet of mannequins, antiques with bruised edges en-masse and a lone pendulum clock.
There are sculptures draped in sheets of plastic. Others lie bare, challenging you to look at them head-on, to gravitate towards them, to engage with them. Outside, there is life and movement – of labour working amid clamour and dust, lifting objects of heft, moving them around. Inside, Kher’s figures are poised and motionless – as though safe-guarding a secret. You have to tip-toe around them, carefully manoeuvring your body to ensure you don’t dislodge an artwork or nudge it over to its shattering demise. But even in this frantic tableau of plinths and pulleys, objects and oddities, ropes and ladders—there is a remarkable stillness; an oddly comforting calm. “I know exactly where every single thing in the studio is,” Kher assures. It’s an orchestrated chaos. “If you ask me to, ‘find that brass pin’, I will know where to look for it.”
The studio is Kher’s sanctuary. “If you want to work and you are a woman, you have to find a studio or a room for yourself,” she says, channelling the feminist thinker and writer, Virginia Woolf. Kher was seven when she declared to her mother that she was going to be an artist. At school, she began learning the discipline with an art teacher who she says, “taught me everything”. At art school, under the tutelage of Susanna Heron, she recalls her class being instructed to study the anatomy of an orange. Kher spent three days with the humble fruit. “We had to peel it, draw the skin, smell the skin, draw the smell, draw the pith, play with the pith, then take a seed, cut it, see what’s inside. Feel it. Understand it. Draw it,” she says. For today’s generation that is driven and distracted by the blink-and miss social media, this would seem like a highly dull assignment, but to a young artist like Kher, it instilled patience and an enduring curiosity to question what lay beneath the surface.
It is one of the moments she attributes to her quasi-ritualistic act of picking things apart, allowing them to come undone in her studio. It has earned her the reputation of an artist who likes to ‘break things’. “The idea of breaking for me was not something I was consciously doing at the beginning when I started making work,” she confesses. “But I realised that I was sometimes breaking open objects because I didn’t really know how to approach them. To set an object free from itself, you have to change it. So how do you change it? You break it from itself. So, I play. I break things. I crack them open. I turn them inside out to show you what is inside.”
In September 2022, Kher exhibited a towering eighteen-foot bronze figure in New York, supported by the Public Art Fund. Swathed in a sari, the maternal giant named Ancestor bears over twenty heads on her body— appendages that symbolise her “diverse children”. The totemic sculpture, with an elaborate coiffure, reflects a cross weave of cultures, a plurality of identities and a collective sense of belonging. Its form is a nod to the many-breasted Greek goddess Artemis, also known as the Diana of Ephesus, who among many things, is an ancient deity of fertility. She was once prayed to by women to aid in conception.
Bharti Kher, “Ancestor”, 2022. Courtesy the artist; Hauser & Wirth; Perrotin; Nature Morte, New Delhi. Presented by Public Art Fund at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, New York City, September 8, 2022-August 27, 2023. Photo: Nicholas Knight, Courtesy Public Art Fund, NY.
Ancestor is a member of the Intermediaries series and is the tallest one yet. The striking sculpture could be interpreted as a visual metaphor for our multi-regional roots, our multiple tongues and our mixed experiences. “All of us are products of where we come from and yet our experiences between cultures are the most complex and interesting parts of us,” explains Kher. She has often, therefore, described the Intermediaries as the ‘in-between people’ – a family of hybrids.
The Intermediaries too, was born out of breakage. It began with Kher’s fascination with Golu dolls – vividly painted clay figurines that are often used in festivals. Sometime in 2014 or 2015, she began collecting them in South India, where these dolls are available. More than five hundred pieces were delivered to Delhi in crates. “By the time the dolls arrived, however, many of them were cracked and broken,” Kher recalls. “I was really upset.”
Bharti Kher, “The Intermediaries (series)”, 2019, Courtesy the artist; Nature Morte, New Delhi.
For three years, the dolls remained in her studio, untouched, quietly witnessing the artist potter about, creating all kinds of things. People who visited Kher’s workshop would be curious about the motley crew of dolls. “These are great,” some would say. “What are you going to do with them?” Kher would simply shrug and answer, “I don’t know.”
Until one day, she picked up the cloven beings and decided to “stick them back together.” Kher attached different heads to different bodies and was pleased with the outcome. It wasn’t long before she too began breaking the dolls a little further. “You had to tap them at a certain place and they would just open. Cluck,” she clicks her tongue. “Like a walnut.”
So, while Kher breaks things, she also makes things. Creation through the act of destruction. “I’m in this constant process of the positive and negative – two energies – one of undoing, one of doing, one of breakage, one of repair.” It can be read as an intimately cerebral way of looking at life. “We are constantly remaking ourselves as individuals,” she says. We are learning and unlearning; we seem to fall apart, only to piece ourselves back together. In a way, Kher notes, the Intermediaries is about “the many possibilities of the self.”
Kher showed a suite of the Intermediaries, “about twenty-five of them altogether” at a group show titled ‘Uncombed, Unforeseen, Unconstrained’ in Venice in April 2022, for which she had designed a new plinth.
Bharti Kher, “VIRUS 2010 - 2039 (ongoing), VIRUS XI”, Installation view at “A Consummate Joy”, IMMA Dublin, 2019. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Ros Kavanagh.
The artist has a proclivity to make things that veer away from the known. She challenges our reality by giving us the unexpected. She de-familiarises us from what we have been taught. In her studio, a bunch of ropes lie on a table, knotted and noosed. They appear to be dyed grey. Only, they are not ropes, but delicate cement sculptures that mimic the form of thick, braided cords. These fragile imposters, with their deftly-intricate detailing, are convincingly real, until you reach out and touch them.
The project began with Kher’s experiments to make shipper’s knots. Once she had mastered the art of making them, she decided to take it a step further by casting them in cement. “Imagine the nature of a rope,” Kher explains. “It’s bendy and flexible. What does it mean when you cast it in cement? Once the rope is cast, it’s fixed; it can never be undone. It’s a psychological piece where things that are done, cannot be undone. Once something has been spoken, it can’t be taken back. What I want to do with my material and my work, is to begin at one point and walk you to the next – and in between there and here, is a transformation and that’s the magic of making.”
““I break things. I crack them open. I turn them inside out to show you what is inside.””
To make the kind of art Kher does is not easy. She operates on a higher artistic and intellectual plane. Which is why in the past, not everyone has fully embraced her vision. Her now iconic work, The Skin Speaks a Language not its Own (2006), a fibreglass sculpture of a defeated elephant, lying collapsed on the ground, was not conceptually understood at first. “I had to fight quite hard for it,” she says. Kher had been invited to create a special work and she had proposed the poignant sculpture of the dying elephant.
She recalls, “They said, ‘It’s too depressing! Could you make it happier?’” It led to a series of discussions but the artist stood her ground. “Finally, I said, ‘No, I’m going to make this work. If you don’t want it, it’s fine, I’ll make it for myself.’” And so, it became a personal challenge, a project through which Kher wanted to create a work that lifted itself out of its own sadness.
The artwork made history. In 2010, it sold for US$ 1.5 million at Sotheby’s, establishing Kher as a force to reckon with by setting a new record for the most expensive sale by a contemporary female artist from India at an auction. Kher had used her signature textural marker – the sperm-shaped bindi – to create the elephant’s dappled skin and give a sense of movement to its body, lifting the work visually and conceptually.
Bharti Kher, “The skin speaks a language not its own”, 2006, Courtesy the artist.
Her ongoing project, Virus (2010-2039), which was on view in October 2022 in the Arnolfini gallery, UK, wasn’t fully understood by many in 2008 either, when she installed the first version at The Baltic, Gateshead. Now, over a decade later, people are definitely seeing its potential. Virus (2010-2039), is a spiral made of ten thousand bindis on a wall. Conceived as a thirty-year project, Kher makes different iterations of the Virus, created for specific exhibitions, where each rendition is an enigmatic disc of colour.
Its circular form resembles a clock or a compass: one is the marker of time; the other is a signifier of spatial direction. The installation can be understood as a chronicle of our times, as well as a leap into the future. Kher describes Virus (2010-2039) as a ‘time capsule’ or a ‘vortex’. Its accompanying text often weaves facts with imaginary prophecies. For instance, Kher predicts that by 2035 (Virus XXVI), “holographic recreations of dead people will become a possibility.” Virus XIII that will be installed at Arnolfini, was made during Covid. The specific text for it forecasts that, “Water will be the new weapon of war, with worsening climate changes affecting fresh water reservoirs.”
Bharti Kher, “And all the while the benevolent slept”, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Perrotin, Nature Morte, New Delhi.
The female figure forms a strong part of the artist’s oeuvre, but many of the works pulsate with a strong and macabre energy. Whether it is Pieta (2021), a life-size sculpture of her mother that is partially smashed hollow to show the vulnerability of motherhood, or the frightening, yet self-sacrificial figure of the Hindu goddess, Chinnamasta in And all the while the benevolent slept (2008), who spews blood from her severed head to feed the world.
What does Kher want to communicate through these powerful and sometimes terrifying beings?
“That the world often projects the female form as something entirely else: mostly a sanitised version of femininity,” she replies. “Yet women know that giving birth is a furious and beautiful experience. It is the most raw and primal thing that you create and then expel something from your own body out into the world. That [the child] is covered in blood and fluid. And, when you kiss your child, you are tasting your own blood and your own body,” she says. “We do not talk about this kind of beautiful and creative ferocity exacted on the female body. I am making manifestations of that in the forms I make.”
Kher’s fantastical creatures are truth-tellers, hewn out of a reality we tend to overlook or rarely acknowledge. The figures are, as Kher succinctly puts it, the possibilities of the self. “Within us there are many pluralities; we are so many things,” she says. “And I’m just a people-watcher” –- one who silently observes, but valiantly creates.
