The Wick - Bharti Kher. Photo © Jean-Francois Jaussaud

Monday Muse

Interview Contemporary British-Indian Artist Bharti Kher

Interview

Bharti Kher

Photography

Jean-Francois Jaussaud

17 June 2024

Interview

Bharti Kher

Photography

Jean-Francois Jaussaud

17 June 2024

Artist Bharti Kher is known as a maker of many things – paintings, textiles, sculptures, collages – but really it’s the fluidity and multiplicity of Kher’s works, as she moves freely between forms and materials even in the same piece, that stands out and make her such an astonishing artist.

Take for example, the meticulously applied bindis applied to painted board, such as a glorious Untitled diptych, 2009, dazzling and illusory – neither painting or sculpture. Bindis frequently recur in many works of Kher’s, from abstract compositions to installations – a symbol traditionally associated with the third eye and a mark of marriage, but that has been transformed – sometimes through misappropriation – in meaning as eastern and western cultures have mixed over centuries. It’s this space ‘in between’ that Kher explores so well – between invented and found, imagined and real, collective and individual, spiritual and profane.

Taking over the Underground Gallery and gardens at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park from Saturday 22 June 2024 – Sunday 27 Apr 2025, Alchemies has at its centre Kher’s long fascination with creating hybrid figures – eerie, beguiling and powerful sculptures that combine casts made from real women’s bodies, with mythological, natural and fantastical elements, to create beings that the artist describes as “part truth, and part fiction, part me, and part you”. Also at the heart of the exhibition is Kher’s work Sari Women, a series that also refers to her own upbringing – her mother ran a sari shop in London where Kher would help dress mannequins at the weekend.

Just ahead of this major moment, Kher took time to talk to The Wick Culture and share more about her approach to her art, where she finds inspiration, why she loves dancing in her studio, and where to eat the very best Indian dhaba food in London.

THE WICK: You’ve described your process as ‘I hear it, taste it, eat it, write it, draw it’ – can you tell us more about this approach?

Bharti Kher: When I make art, I approach the object in the same way as I interact through the world: with my 5 senses awake and open. To be present with things as they are and hear the tone of what it is: with memories and stories and experience. Everything is energy and moves through us and around us.

TW: How do you take stock of this?

BK: I love to remind myself that the snake hears with its tongue and infra radiation to locate the heat of another; an elephant uses its feet to hear over long distances and its trunk to sense; the whale uses low frequency sound to communicate with other whales 10,000km away; bats navigate using echolocation: their mouths produce sounds that bounce off objects. A shrimp has 14 types of photoreceptors that allow in light; an octopus can see in the darkest of waters; bees can sense the earth’s magnetic field and predict storms; it is said that animals fled upland in tsunami and birds gave warnings to humans who could not hear or heed the warnings. Mankind’s hubris is that we think we know everything and art I think, always tell us that we don’t.

TW: Your work often deals with the space ‘in between’. Do you see this space as also being a fertile space for creativity? 

BK: Yes, the 3rd space is a place of the unknown. Middle grounds are also good, but in between spaces are areas where grey and matter collide. They are narrower and literally slits in which secrets lie. They collapse into themselves. To be neither nor, either this or that is the space for growth and learning. It’s also a freedom from definitive labels or answers and I like that. The way we live in our world is never fixed.

TW: Many of your works return to certain Indian emblems, motifs, and materials – how do you choose these?

BK: They choose me.

TW: You divide your time between London and New Delhi; what prompted your move to New Delhi some decades ago, and how has the art scene evolved there since – you co-founded Khoj, which continues to offer great opportunities for artists today.

BK: I moved to Delhi in 1993 after I met my husband Subodh, and we just stayed. I fell in love with the country, the kids went to school, we built our studios and friendships and a life there. The art scene has evolved in leaps and bounds and that’s encouraging but there is still much work to do and bureaucracy to untangle. We have over 800 museums in India but most of them barely function let alone as spaces for the public. But there are fantastic museums now such as the Bihar Museum in Patna. It gives me hope but it’s a drop in the ocean. I was the Chairwoman of Khoj for 13 years.

“West Yorkshire was the heart of the textile trade in the UK. It seemed fitting to send the sari works to YSP and in fact there is much use of fabric and clothes in my work.”

The Wick - Bharti Kher, Strange Attractor, 2021. © Bharti Kher. Courtesy of the artist and Nature Morte. Photo © Jeetin Sharma

The Wick - Bharti Kher, Chocolate Muffin, 2004. © Bharti Kher. Courtesy of the artist

The Wick - Bharti Kher, Warrior with Cloak and Shield, 2008. © Bharti Kher. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo © Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich

The Wick - Bharti Kher, The hot winds that blow from the West, 2011. © Bharti Kher. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo © Genevieve Hanson

The Wick - Bharti Kher, Animus Mundi (detail), 2018. © Bharti Kher. Courtesy of the artist and Nature Morte. Photo © Jeetin Sharma (1)

The Wick - Bharti Kher. Photo © Jeetin Sharma

The Wick - Bharti Kher, Man Woman (I), 2012. © Bharti Kher. Courtesy of the artist and Nature Morte. Photo © Jeetin Sharma

The Wick - Bharti Kher, And all the while the benevolent slept, 2008. © Bharti Kher. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo © Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich

TW: How does the environment in each city  shape your work?

BK: I’ve always loved to respond to sites. I want to understand what has passed and what stories have been told, who walked here before me and why. West Yorkshire was the heart of the textile trade in the UK. It seemed fitting to send the sari works to YSP and in fact there is much use of fabric and clothes in my work. My father used to come up to Huddersfield as a young man when he first came to the UK to buy textiles and do business. Djinn was made for the south facing summit of the park. He catches the sun rising and setting to the east and west. He sat as the talisman for the show.

TW: In London, where would you go for the best Indian food? 

BK: Either my mum’s house or mine: both she and Subodh are phenomenal cooks. Or then I go to Lahore in Feltham, Surrey for the best Indian dhaba food (a dhaba is a local street food place). It’s like being in Punjab or Lahore: it’s very loud and always packed with families at a big table. Take your own beer and whiskey and order the karela Ghosh; yellow dahl; butter chicken; fish tikka; seekh kebabs and tandoori roti. Nowhere more authentic.

TW: You’re known not only for your works but the way you choreograph them in different spaces: how important is that element of the work to you and how much are you thinking about that already in the process of making?

BK: I make exhibitions in my head all the time in the studio; like playlists (which I also make). You need to get the perfect rhythm of an exhibition and I want the space to sing and the work to quite literally dance in the space. So I play around with ideas and work quite a lot before deciding what to do. It’s a pitch that needs tuning all the time and volume both tonal and spatial has to be taken into consideration. It’s like you are drawing an arc through the space.

TW:  What can visitors expect at your forthcoming YSP exhibition?

BK: I hope that visitors can see a range and breadth to the practice that isn’t linear at all. Yet it all connects somewhere. Maybe they also get a sense of a restlessness in the work that keeps the dynamic and tension just enough to take you away to the next work. Visitors will see that I use a huge range of materials and finishes. Every object has a story.

TW: A book that has changed your life?

BK: Hanif Kureshi, The Buddha of Suburbia because I grew up in the UK and had never read any fiction that had spoken about me as an Asian girl growing up in the suburbs. It was sexy and rude and punk. It spoke about racism and class with brute humour and satire. I was 20 when it came out and I read it in one go. I thought that finally someone was writing us into literature in a way that wasn’t tokenistic. It was my life, the same things had happened to me such as being selected for the school play to be one of the 3 kings (the Indian one that brought frankincense …but I wanted to be Mary or some fairy princess type). Even the father was a self-orientalised guru of yoga and mysticism and I knew it was true because I had seen the same play out in my own life. It made me laugh and still does. In 1985 we all watched my Beautiful Laundrette. It blew open a door.

TW: A fantasy artwork you’d like to own?

BK: The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, because it’s about the craziest overwhelm of mankind’s folly, it’s satirical and tender, wildly imaginative and exists in a realm beyond the real. I love triptychs: they move you through time. Trinities and triangles, that have no inside and no outside, no beginning or end or middle for that matter. Every time you see this work, something else emerges.

TW: And finally, who is your personal ultimate Monday Muse?     

BK: Making day: I always start the week at the studio. I want to work myself, not do admin or read or research. I try to make something. Draw or paint or sculpt some new thing. It reminds me that this is where I want to put my attention the most. It’s the grounding to start the week. Reminds me to check in and not get distracted by the world that never stops turning.