For contemporary painter and sculptor Bharti Kher (b. 1969, London), the central question of identity (as body, gender, language, and motif) is inextricably linked to the question of artifice — as an existential, aesthetic, biological, and ethical trope. Kher’s women in her important photographic suite, The Hybrid Series, which includes The Hunter and the Prophet, Chocolate Muffin, Angel, Family Portrait, and Feather Duster (all from 2004), exist in a liminal state between humdrum domesticity and violent phantasmagoria, as their photoshopped selves — part human, part animal — appear both seductive and demure, seemingly in agreement with their given roles, as well as domineering and resistant, having elected to relish in their own duplicitous and multiplying selfhoods. The poetics of the body reveals Kher’s interests in entropy, mutation, and transformation, as witnessed by humans and animals alike. Kher’s series of animal-based works, including Misdemeanours (2006), The skin speaks a language not its own (2006) and An Absence of Assignable Cause (2007), together may constitute what Benjamin H.D. Buchloh has termed as “the embodiment of the spectacularized uncanny par excellence.” For Kher, agents such as folly, accident, satire, and play go to the heart of what it means to be a practicing artist, and to relate to the world through art.

The artist has been engaged with the varying traditions of the readymade, Minimalism and Abstraction (through repeated gestures and forms), and mythology and narrativity for the past twenty years. This fifteen-year survey of Kher’s practice from the early years of the 21st century through to the present — represented by new bodies of work made specifically for the Rockbund Art Museum and its related institutional and cultural histories — constitutes a synthesized overview into a complex and evolving worldview and the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Asia. The exhibition also includes two site-specific installations that will serve as “skins” to encase the museum façade and conjoin two exhibition spaces on consecutive floors. These architectural interventions serve as mirrors to Kher’s own use of the bindi to serve as a carrier of the other, and an object that revels in both its ability to decorate and enliven attention, as well as to subsume and obscure the gaze.

The exhibition has been curated by Sandhini Poddar, Mumbai-based art historian and adjunct curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and will be accompanied by a scholarly catalogue and roster of public programs.

*image (left)
Hybrid series: Self Portrait, 2004
© Bhati Kher
courtesy of the artist and Rockbund Art Museum