Bharti Kher

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.