Bharti Kher believes growing up as a young Indian person in an English suburb in the 1970s and 80s gave her a sense of being different, and that experience shaped the development of her diverse practice when she moved to New Delhi in 1993. ‘Alchemies, her largest UK show to date, is displayed in the Underground Gallery and surrounding gardens of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where four monumental bronzes use hybridity to resist conventions. I asked her about a few of the many strands of work on view.
Bharti Kher, Alchemies, installation view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2024. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, Nature Morte and Perrotin. Photo © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park
As the title indicates, ‘Alchemies’ is themed around your particular interest in transformation – of material and also of people. What has brought you to that interest?
I’ve always looked at material as something that has the potential for change in its meaning as well as its form. Here, I was pushing that further to talk about the possibilities for the self and the body. The body is the heart of my work: you’re given a body at birth to travel and experience the world in time and space. You can look at alchemy as the search for an elixir, a means of curing the body or prolonging life, and my art taps into those ideas of magical possibility. I think a lot of artists do that – we play with ideas and then sometimes we’re mad scientists.
Is there something else that you would particularly like to be?
I would be an astrophysicist, a biologist, an anthropologist, an archaeologist, a geologist, a philosopher! And also some animals – such as an elephant or a whale, because I’ve made them and they are socially sophisticated beings. I read a lot about animals, most recently Karen Bakker’s book ‘The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants’. Science is now telling us what indigenous cultures have always known: that all living beings communicate through complex networks of sound and huge acoustic ranges that are mostly inaudible to the human ear. Elephants for example, can hear over 30 km with their feet, feeling vibrations.
The hubris of man is that we think we are the most sophisticated beings on the planet, but we don’t seem to be doing a very good job of taking care of it. We don’t understand the language of animals, and therefore suppose they don’t communicate, don’t have consciousness. In fact we should respect all living things. The snake hears with its tongue; and bats can pinpoint an insect through echolocation, although they are blind.
Bharti Kher, The deaf room, 2001–2012 . Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, Nature Morte and Perrotin. Photo © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park – glass, bricks, clay, 240 x 240 x 240 cm
‘The deaf room’ is made from glass bangles melted down to create glass bricks. Why that particular transformation?
I try to push materials around themselves, letting them sit in the studio for a really long time until I activate them in the right way. The question is: what can a material do? How can it transform a work into being something more than the objecthood of itself? I’d been working with bangles, so I’d been looking at the possibility of them – and I’m a believer in chance. The deaf room was sparked into its form as a room by riots in India in 2002. It was a politically volatile time. Religious animosity erupted. I saw a newspaper image of a house that had burned down, and in the corner of a room you could see bangles on the floor. The sound of the bangles is actually very joyful, it is the sound of women moving through a house. They’re also of course very fragile – they break easily and are disposable. You can create narratives around and into a particular work, and then leave it, let the work do what it needs to do.
Bharti Kher, The deaf room, 2001–2012 (detail). Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, Nature Morte and Perrotin. Photo © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Why is the clay between the glass bricks so prominent?
I feel that I needed tension against the rigidity of the brick. I felt it was too austere. It needed more earthiness and a softness, and having the clay oozing out makes it almost human.
You are known for working with bindis. Are they all found forms?
I use only the shapes I’ve found in the market: circle, snake, arrow, star. But as I use so many, I started producing them myself with higher quality fabrics, archival glues and better dyes. The bindi is the marker of the third eye, and that’s the idea in the works I make; consciousness and how things are perceived in the world – it doesn’t need to be too complicated and yet, in other ways, it is.
Bharti Kher, Milk teeth, 2021 (overall and detail). Bindis on smashed mirror, 252 x 191 x 7 cm
‘Milk teeth’ and ‘A poem for night creatures’ apply bindis to mirrors that have been broken and then repaired. Why?
When they are applied to mirrors I’ve broken, they start to look like repair and reparation. The idea is that the works are also watching you. The third eye meets the mirror. And mirrors are fascinating. I do lots of research, and I started reading about the invention of mirrors in Venice, how mirrors were at one time more expensive than a Rubens painting. We kind of forget that mirrors only came about in the 16th century. And that they altered the idea of the self – only after the invention of mirrors could people start to look at themselves rather than projecting it from looking at someone else. When someone died, they would hold the mirror in front of the mouth, first to see if there was any breath – but they also believed that the mirror would then hold the soul of the departed.
It became a superstition that broken mirrors bring bad luck – that really had a financial basis, as mirrors were so valuable. The largest mirrors were pocket-sized as they were so expensive to make. Mirror makers were seen as alchemists, and the making of mirrors was such a closely-guarded secret that there are stories of espionage and murder on the routes from Venice. Such were the first 20-30 years of mirrors.
Bharti Kher: Alchemies, installation view with Warrior with Cloak and Shield, 2008, at centre – resin, banana leaf, cotton, stainless steel, 241 x 170 x 196 cm. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, Nature Morte and Perrotin. Photo © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Gallery 2 contains twenty works, all of which transform women in different ways. Could we talk about ‘Warrior with Cloak and Shield’ as an example of that?
She is my favourite as well. There’s something so awkward about her, she’s vulnerable and strong at the same time. When I make the women sculptures I’m casting people that I know, catching essences of their personality or their body, then I’m also transforming them into the potential of urban Goddesses, and helping the work claim its own vulnerability – which is human – while allowing them to possess something that is magical too, that’s about something greater than them.
Like all of the women, it’s a psychological work. How do you conduct your so-called battles? Are they within? Are they without? Her shield is just a banana leaf from my studio. It’s about fragility – things are not always what they seem to be – we label but we also create meanings of things, of objects, and that is the transformation, where we allow one thing to be other things.
She’s the warrior but she’s stuck. How can she move with those antlers? We’re all conditioned by domestic spaces, so I want the figures to be larger, so they’re almost encumbered by their selves, as well as magnificent. I just thought: no, she must not be able to get out through a six foot double door. The only way she gets out is through teleportation.
You could call her a paradox?
There is always paradox in my work – the meaning, the material, what is given to you and what you don’t know. I’m not interested in what I know, I want the work to take me to a place where I’m not sure. I am sometimes quite confused by my own work, but I take that as good sign!
Bharti Kher, The Intermediary Family, 2018. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, Nature Morte and Perrotin. Photo © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park – bronze, 480 x 155 x 177 cm
Outside, ‘The Intermediary Family’ is a monumental sculpture from a long-running series that combines separate figures. How did they come about?
It all began with small clay models, I’ve been collecting since 2015. They are dolls made for religious festivals. They represent the avatars of gods, animals, food. They are already painted – sometimes I keep the flaked-off paint as it is, sometimes I add more. ‘The Intermediary Family’ is man-woman-child.
Because the dolls are clay, they are very fragile. Many pieces arrive broken, and I discarded them for a while before realising that connected to my practice. And they’re made in two parts, so they naturally split open, and I started to really enjoy the inner aspect of the work. And it connected with other things – I break things in the studio, I’m interested in the interior, in negative space, and opposites attract me…
I’ve probably made 150, and some of them I felt could work at scale—not all can. I also wanted to make some outdoor work. Most of my work is quite fragile—I’m asked if I can put it outside, and I say, ‘Absolutely not!’
Bharti Kher: ‘Alchemies’ is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park to 27 April 2025. All works courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, Nature Morte and Perrotin. Photos © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park, except ‘Milk Teeth’ (photos Paul Carey-Kent)
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