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Journalism of Courage
Inside Bharti Khers studio where she turns her daughters dolls and innocuous bindis into intense art
Bharti Khers three-storey studio in Gurgaon is a cross between a playhouse inhabited by a grown-up and the set of a Hollywood monster movie. Littered around the studio is an organised mess of cracked mirrors and beheaded toys. The hairy hand of an ape lies on a counter,next to a set of teacups with fake teeth stuck to the rim. A collection of discarded radiators is parked in the driveway. An eight-foot,three-headed,fibreglass goddess,named after the four humours,Choleric,Phlegmatic,Melancholy and Sanguine,sits in the garden.
The goddess is an experimental version of a work that was finally cast in bronze, says the 41-year-old artist. I do many versions and like to play around with different media before I decide on the final piece. The original is currently installed in Southwood Garden at St Jamess Church in Piccadilly,London. The masked faces of the goddess are contorted and witch-like while the tentacles of this terrifying being have impaled a young woman on her stomach. I like my art to shake things up. It is not my job to make my viewers comfortable. I would rather leave them shocked or disturbed, says Kher. This version of disquiet has travelled across galleries,and at a recent Sothebys auction in London,a mammoth edition of it grabbed close to a million pounds: The Skin Speaks a Language Not its Own,an almost life-size sculpture of a splayed elephant covered in sperm-shaped bindis,went for 993,250 Rs 6.9 crore,setting a personal record for Kher and reaffirming her place among Indias best contemporary artists.
The thing preoccupying her right now is a set of toys sitting atop her wooden cabinet. These have been stolen from her seven-year-old daughter and are waiting to be beheaded. Her Waq Tree,a sculpture shown at Art Basel in 2009 and at a recent solo at Hauser amp; Wirth in London,blossoms into such lifeless toy heads just another instance of play morphing into phantasmagoria. Amid this menagerie,Kher looks like Lewis Carrols Red Queen who would at any moment rise from her throne and shout Off with their heads! Instead,she offers us black coffee and sinks into a sofa. I take a really long time on each piece and have several works in production. I can spend up to a year with a sculpture,waiting for it to speak to me and tell me where it wants to go, says Kher. Her sculptures range from a terrifying,headless Kali with copper wires sprouting from her neck to the sanguine Warrior Woman who is half-tree,half-clothes rack. I am usually inspired by mythology from ancient Greece and India to modern fabrications like Hera Moon that is modelled on a Delhi society lady, says Kher.
An England-born Indian,she came to Delhi to show her work in the late 1990s when she met and married artist Subodh Gupta. Kher has since been negotiating her way through this landscape and its images. I am a second-generation Indian who calls England my home, she says. My father moved to England in the late 1960s. He established himself as a businessman but isnt especially wealthy. I did not know what it was like to live in India until I came here and began reclaiming parts of my own understanding of it. I didnt understand anything to begin with and I started looking at the market to guide me, says Kher,who reacted strongly to the bazaars of Delhi. I began re-looking at things like the bindi; I first approached it as an outsider but it is now part of my language, says Kher,leading us into a room of mirrors,where women are sticking bindis of various shapes and colours on glass. I dont like the women to be photographed, she says cryptically.
Kher recently covered the interior of a bridal chamber with bindis. The work is to be viewed only through the windows to evoke a sense of voyeurism. When I decorated it,I thought it was a confessional which is why the arrangement of bindis was meant to evoke a telling of all my secrets and sins, she says.
Kher studied to be a painter at Middlesex Polytechnic,London,but has always been more excited by other media like sculpture and collage. Her husband too has made a similar transition from painting to sculpture. Subodh and I do share a lot of our work,though our styles could not be more different, she says. We have so much fun doing his photo-shoots. Once I covered him from head to toe in Vaseline and he sat on a sofa, recalls Kher,laughing at the image of a slippery Subodh Gupta posing in the nude. That photograph of Gupta caused a few ripples in the art world though few know Kher to be the author of that photograph. In our kind of art,there are many collaborators who make the work happen,from masons to carpenters, says Kher. Clearly,the author of a work remains the one with ideas.
