Bharti Kher

Bharti Kher
Born	1969 London
Education	Newcastle Polytechnic

Bharti Kher (born 1969) is an Indian contemporary artist. Her work encompasses painting, sculpture and installation, often incorporating bindis, the popular forehead decoration worn by women in India, in her work.

Bharti Kher was born in England. She studied painting, graduating in 1991 from Newcastle Polytechnic. At 23, she moved to New Delhi in India, where she lives and works today. She is married to Indian Contemporary Artist Subodh Gupta.

Kher's works are heterogeneous. Her work is engaged with the readymade, minimalism and abstraction (through repetition), mythology and narrativity.

Overarching themes are the notion of the self as a multiple and culture's openness to misinterpretation. She exploits the drama inherent in objects, tapping into mythologies and the numerous diverse associations a thing can bring. Kher has said "I look everywhere and copy everyone – I am like a magpie that takes what it needs and turns an old shiny button into a beacon. Most of us are products of our lives."

"The bindis play with the visual aesthetic and conceptual ideas that I have been pushing for many years now: the bindi as an object of ritual (the sacred now turned secular), of conceptual clarity (as the third eye) and brazen habit. It becomes a leitmotif that connects disparate ideas and things and now functions like a skin that marks a surface. The application of the bindi represents an unbroken ritual practiced daily by millions of Indian women and has been described by anthropologist Marcel Mauss as “techniques of the body,” which, like other physical disciplines such as consumption and eating, are repetitive and periodic. I take it all and run with the possibility of making image and idea look beautiful and the bindis make the works feel strangely human."' (Bharti Kher, 2012)

In 1995 Kher was struck by a woman in a market wearing a 'sperm' bindi on her forehead. She asked the woman where it came from and went straight to the store. 'I walked in and said, "give me all the serpent bindis you have," which turned out to be a few packages that she stuck in her sketchbook. It turned out to be a supernova moment.'

Since then, Bindis have become Kher’s signature, operating not so much as a central motif as a language that the artist has invented to articulate and animate her themes. Bindis swarm over sculptures endowing them with a cryptic second skin. They are deployed in vivid chromatic constellations to form 'paintings' whose abstract patterns relate to the history of western art whilst seeming biological and essential – resembling cellular life viewed under a microscope or the intercourse of oceans and continents viewed from a satellite. Each dot or sperm-like squiggle can be understood as a person, their arrangement en masse mapping demographic movement, the migrations and miscegenation of teeming populaces.

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