Bharti Kher
The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own 2006
Bindi’s on fiberglass
152.4cm x 457.2cm x 182.9cm
Bharti Kher
Born London
1969.
Lives and works in New Delhi
When I made
some works over the years, I couldn’t hold the thread that linked it all
together… and then one day, being optimistic, I thought the world was a
positive place where all things co-existed chaotically and awkwardly as life
marched on, and so it was OK to lose the threads sometimes. There is no fixed
strategy in my work. Bharti Kher 1
Raised in
England, Bharti Kher was educated in painting and design at Newcastle and
Middlesex Polytechnics. Since 1993, she has lived and worked in Delhi, her
trans-national perspective engenders both personal and ethnographic observations
of contemporary Indian life as well describing a long-term negotiation of her
identity in India.
Bharti Kher began
an ongoing engagement with issues of gender in ‘Hirsute’, a project undertaken
from 1999 to 2001 in which she studied variations in the moustaches worn by
different men in her neighbourhood; as an abstraction of the conventions of
masculinity, the work arranged painted close-ups of individual moustaches in a
rectilinear grid. At the same time, the artist introduced a series of works
that transformed traditional brightly coloured bindis, part of a traditional
feminine iconography, into highly decorative images of masculinity.
