Bharti Kher’s homely studio space is nestled in a bustling suburb of New Delhi, the Indian capital. It is a sleek multiplex containing a multitude of installation works, objects, and works in progress. Kher’s practice is informed by her position as an artist located between countries and societies. The materials and imagery that Kher began to explore during the 1990s reflected her relocation from the United Kingdom, where she was born in 1969, to New Delhi in 1993. The photographic work Making Monsters (1995) shows Kher preparing a quintessentially British dessert – apple crumble – in an Indian kitchen. In contrast, the painting Death of a Snake Charmer (2000), whose main panel features an array of chairs common in Indian middle-class dining rooms, with the servant's quarters in the lower-left corner, depicts socioeconomic disparity in India.

Strangely prescient is the title of Don’t Eat Meat on Tuesdays (1998), since as of March 2021 some states in India – including Gurgaon where Kher resides – have banned the selling of raw meat on Tuesdays for religious reasons. The series of paintings show suitcases rendered on army camouflage fabric commonly used for suitcase coverings throughout the 1980s and 1990s in India. The work is a response to the train station bombings that occurred in India at the time and the resulting announcements warning commuters not to touch unattended baggage.

Throughout her practice, which spans two decades and includes paintings, sculptures, and installations, Kher has maintained a way of working that remains resolutely exploratory, as she repositions objects that reference bodies and rituals.

The artist’s now-iconic bindi works, for example, refer to the body both conceptually, through the use of bindis as adornments representing the third eye, and physically, in terms of their scale, the dimensions of the larger works being the length and width of the artist’s outstretched body. They are imbued with an awareness of the bindi’s symbolic meaning – derived from the Sanskrit bindu, meaning point, drop, or dot, and regarded as the point from which all creation begins and is ultimately unified. Kher’s work has since developed into a language in which lavish images elicit formal connections with traditions, indeed rituals, across Western and Indian art and culture.

Formally trained at Newcastle Polytechnic (1988–1991), Kher worked primarily with painting when she arrived in India. The first of her bindi works, Spit and Swallow (1996), marked the beginning of a transition from painting to sculpture. One of Kher’s early sculptures was a playful fiberglass rendition of two dog heads, titled Bitch and Butch (1999), a predecessor of her hybridized explorations of form, including The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own (2006), a life-size sculpture of an elephant covered in bindis.

One of the artist’s recent projects, ‘The Intermediaries’, is a series of sculptures composed of clay figurines of mythical beings, which Kher breaks, reassembles, and juxtaposes to create hybridized, otherworldly relics. Amalgamating imagery of mythological iconography and local culture, Kher dismantles found objects to locate the internal possibility of the work and to push them to become something that transcends their objecthood. Hidden vulnerabilities surface in a process akin to Japanese kintsugi, in which acts of fragmentation and repair come together. As Kher explains, ‘I break things to know them, opening up material to discover and reveal something that is not apparent when it is whole.’

To embrace mistakes as interventions speaks to the artist’s fearless and intuitive sense of experimentation. Testament to this is the installation of a predecessor of The Waq Tree (2009) at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, for her solo exhibition there in 2008. The gigantic four-meter-high fiberglass tree with hand-sculpted cast heads protruding as buds on the branches crashed to the ground after an attempt to stabilize it in the exhibition space. The artist approached what would have been an irresolvable catastrophe for most as a serendipitous event, repairing the sculpture in its newfound position.

Today, Kher is perhaps best known for her innovative installation works. They appear to defy gravity as they pervade and dissect open spaces, such as her towering site-specific sculpture The Intermediary Family, installed in various locations across the years. 

Much of Kher’s work stems from explorations of the body as a vehicle for something greater than the sum of its parts, the equilibrium between body and mind, and the space that we occupy not only as individuals but as larger collectives.

The first body cast incorporated into Kher’s work dates back to 2006. Arione’s Sister – which refers to Arion, Hercules’s steed in Greek mythology – depicts the figure of a woman, science fiction–esque, with elongated forehead and green-toned skin, surrounded by a halo of shopping bags. ‘Everyone thinks it’s about shopping with all these bags, but she’s carrying so much baggage actually – I wanted her to be like an angel,’ Kher points out, noting how the meaning of objects and forms can change through a spectrum of viewers and associations.

This kaleidoscopic potential of meaning returns to the form of the body, whose representations, be they amalgamations of body casts with readymades or body casts that comprise the entire work, are common to many of Kher’s exhibitions. Kher admits to asking questions all the time about the body when she’s making work. On the subject of Six Women (2012–2014), which was displayed at the 20th Biennale of Sydney in 2016 and is composed of the body casts of six sex workers from Kolkata whom she paid to sit for her. Kher wonders what truth is located in an assemblage of casts of different people. ‘What is the information that is transmitted from that cast into the work and what is the transaction between me and those women, ethically, philosophically, cathartically?’ 

Perhaps an answer can be found in a work like The Deaf Room (2010–12), a temporary installation consisting of glass bricks made from melted-down bangles, an iconic staple in traditional Indian feminine attire; the bricks become a room that is assembled using clay and dismantled each time it is exhibited. Kher describes the material form of the work as a gesture of silencing the bangles through an act of deconstruction and transformation – ‘You hear nothing now. It’s like a tomb,’ she says. Inspired by the political unrest in India at the time of the work’s making and the absence of female voices that she observed, Kher describes a ‘sense in the work that women somehow pay a price, and that’s absence.’

Both innovative and audacious, Kher affixes a set of concerns around the physical, social, and political existence of the body with a visual language that weaves between figurative representations and allusions to the human condition. Exemplifying an ever-evolving hybridity that runs through her life and work, Kher’s process of breaking down dichotomies yields an aesthetic of female empowerment, contesting social-cultural norms. 

Bharti Kher is represented by Perrotin, Paris, Hong Kong, New York, Seoul, Shanghai, and Tokyo; Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Somerset, and St. Moritz; and Nature Morte, New Delhi.

Bhavna Kakar is Publisher and Editor of Take on Art, as well as Director at Latitude 28.

Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Bharti Kher in her Delhi studio, 2021. 2. A view of Bharti Kher's Delhi studio, 2021. 3. Bharti Kher in her Delhi studio, 2021. All images by Dolly Devi for Art Basel.