Бхарти Кхер
بهارتي خير
巴帝珂

The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own

source: peupledepapierblogspot

Bharti Kher
Elle est née en 1969 à Londres
Elle vit et travaille à Delhi en Inde.
Son travail fait usage de bandes qu’elle utilise pour parer des sculptures monumentales en fibre de verre souvent inspirées du monde animal et créer des compositions.
Son oeuvre est plongée dans les questions d’identité et de culture.
Un travail vraiment très intéressant et hors norme.
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source: saffronart

Bharti Kher’s is an art of dislocation and transience, reflecting her own, largely itinerant life. Born and raised in England, the artist moved to New Delhi in the early 1990s after her formal training in the field, and today, like most of her contemporaries, frequently travels the world attending to exhibitions of her art. Consequently, the concept of home as the location of identity and culture is constantly challenged in her body of work. In addition to an autobiographical examination of identity, Kher’s unique perspective also facilitates an outsider’s ethnographic observation of contemporary life, class and consumerism in urban India.

Presently, Kher uses the ‘bindi’, a dot indicative of the third eye worn by the Indian women on their foreheads, as the central motif and most basic building block in her work. Bharti Kher often refers to her mixed media works with bindis, the mass-produced, yet traditional ornaments, as ‘action paintings’. Painstakingly placed on the surface one-by-one to form a design, the multi-coloured bindis represent custom, often inflexible, as well as the dynamic ways in which it is produced and consumed today. The artist is also known for her collection of wild and unusual resin-cast sculptures, embellished with bindis, and her digital photography.

Bharti Kher was born in London in 1969. She studied at Middlesex Polytechnic, London, and went on to receive her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art Painting with honours from New Castle Polytechnic, in 1988. Some of her most recent solo shows include ‘Virus’ at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, in 2008; ‘An Absence of Assignable Cause’ at Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi, and at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, in 2007; ‘Do Not Meddle In The Affairs of Dragons Because You Are Crunchy and Taste Good with Ketchup’ at Gallery Ske, Bangalore and Project 88, Mumbai, in 2006; ‘Quasi-, mim-, ne-, near-, semi-, -ish, -like’ at Gallery Ske, Bangalore, in 2004; and ‘Hungry Dogs Eat Dirty Pudding’ at Nature Morte, Delhi, also in 2004. She was the recipient of the Sanskriti award in 2003 and has been a part of Khoj since 1997.

The artist lives and works in New Delhi.
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source: lookatmeru

Бхарти Кхер (Bharti Kher) – одна из ведущих современных художниц Индии. Родилась в 1969 году в Лондоне. Приехала в Индию в 1992 году и решила остаться навсегда, встретив там своего будущего мужа. Живет в Дели с мужем и двумя детьми. Создает причудливые скульптуры людей и животных.
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source: ifade

Wie viele zeitgenössische indische Künstler spiegelt auch Bharti Kher ein modernes oder vielmehr postmodernes Lebensgefühl wider, eine Welt, in der Begriffe wie “Authentizität” selten ohne Anführungszeichen gebraucht werden und nationale Grenzen dank der Globalisierung höchst durchlässig geworden sind für Produkte, Ideen und Bilder, die zuvor nicht unbedingt weltweite Verbreitung genossen. Khers eigener kultureller Hintergrund – als Inderin in England geboren und aufgewachsen, lebt und arbeitet sie heute wieder in Indien – prädestiniert sie geradezu zur Beschäftigung mit Konzepten nationaler Identität. Das Bindi, ein zentrales Motiv in vielen ihrer Arbeiten, ist der perfekte Prüfstein für sie: Wie die Künstlerin selbst entzieht es sich beharrlich engen kulturellen oder genderspezifischen Zuschreibungen und ermöglicht ihr, das Banale und das Wunderbare zugleich zu erforschen.
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source: heartmus

Born 1969 in London, UK
Lives and works in New Dehli, India

Working with sculpture, photography and painting, Bharti Kher explores issues of personal identity, social roles and Indian traditions but also from a broader perspective, 21st century issues around genetics, evolution, technology and ecology.

Kher uses the bindi as a central motif in her work, transforming the surfaces of both sculptures and paintings to connect disparate ideas. The bindi is a forehead decoration traditionally made with red pigment and worn by Hindu men and women. It represents the ‘third eye’ the all-knowing intrinsic wisdom and is a symbol of marital status. Recently bindis have been transformed into stick-on vinyl, disposable objects and a secular, feminine fashion accessory. In Kher’s work, the bindi transcends its mass-produced diminutiveness becoming a powerful stylistic and symbolic device, creating visual richness and allowing a multiplicity of meanings, including tensions inherent in shifting definitions of femininity in contemporary India.

Kher’s early figurative paintings explore a female perspective of modern India’s patriarchal society through representations of contemporary Indian interiors. Depicting a pluralism with ancient Indian customs juxtaposed with modern Western values, Kher reveals how, while increasingly receptive to foreign influence, many Indians still remain reverent of their own culture in an overtly conspicuous fashion. This clash of cultures is very apparent to Kher – a British-born child of the Indian Diaspora who has, in contrast to dominant outward migration trends, moved to India as an adult. Recently her panel paintings have been covered with thousands of bindi creating abstract arrangements encoded with patterns of exile, immigration, crossing boundaries and the passage of time.

In response to repressions towards women in India, a number of works by Kher denounce domestic tyrannies that define many women’s lives. In The Girl with the Hairy Lip said No, 2004, Kher disrupts a table laid for a tea-party with broken chinaware, false-teeth and a hair-lined cup, at once critiquing both the English custom of afternoon tea and the Indian bride-viewing tea rituals for arranged marriage ceremonies, with reference to Méret Oppenheim’s surrealist fur lined tea cup.

Animals are another recurring theme in Kher’s work, serving as a metaphor for the body and transformation. I’ve seen an elephant fly, 2002, is a hyper-realistic, life-sized fibreglass sculpture of a grey elephant, covered with white sperm-shaped bindis. While in Buddist and Hindu mythology the white elephant is sacred, in the West, it is a metaphor for something frivolous and useless. In I’ve seen an elephant fly, grey skin is clearly visible behind a white covering, which emphasises the second skin, thereby confusing its identity and value. Kher poses questions about her own complex identity. In The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, 2006 the elephant reappears as a pathos-inducing figure leaving the viewer unsure whether death or recovery is the next stage. This exploration of ‘inbetween-ness’ with an absence of cause and reason are recurrent themes for Kher.

In the sculpture Solarum Series, 2007 Kher returns to the natural world. The tree, a potent symbol that appears in ancient mythologies from many cultures Kher uses such references and combines them with contemporary references, likebiological cloning. The branches of Solarum Series bear the heads of hundreds of creatures: a disturbing and dystopic vision of a genetically engineered hybrid.

Rebecca Morrild