Swimming, swirling, galaxies unfold before my eyes. Ripples of colour, reflection. This inner space. Patterns become portals, cells divided and conquer, a world within worlds.
A multidisciplinary artist, Kher’s artworks span over 3 decades combining themes of myth and science, creating portals to other dimensions, and reflecting our inner world. ‘The Body is a Place’ brings together sculptures including her famous ready-made’s, Bindi paintings and rarely seen drawings.
‘Its like the pencil has been told what to do; the hand knows and the paper listens.’
The first encounter of Kher’s work at the Arnofini is a series of her drawings created at a residency in Somerset in 2019. I visited her exhibition ‘A Wonderful Anarchy’ at Hauser and Wirth that year and was blown away by her sculptures of dissected goddesses and deities.
Drawing is fundamental to Bharti Kher’s practice. She works intuitively, imagining herself inside the paper, working her way back out. The works feel like she is connecting to another realm, creating universes on the paper, and channelling the spiritual. In the same room is another series on paper; ‘Links in a Chain.’ These are created on found objects (a favourite medium for the artist) pages of educational children’s books from the 1930s. These pieces include text and collage. They disrupt the original narrative and now explore questions of race, fear, and neuroses. Kher was born in England, but relocated as young woman to Indian, experiencing the feeling of being other. ‘Not fully British and not fully Indian.’ Exhibited in large steel frames in the centre of the gallery, these double-sided works command attention as you move through the space.
The first floor of the exhibition hosts a selection of Kher’s large scale Bindi paintings. A bindi is traditionally a coloured dot representing the sixth chakra or the third eye in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. An access to inner wisdom, to retain energy and a symbol for marriage. Kher abstracts this symbol and turns it into the cellular world of a virus. She began making this series in 2010 and mapped out a series for Virus to be made over the next 30 years. With each Virus, Kher accompanies a predictive text about the future. She references things in her personal life, technological advancements, climate change and medical advancements. Here are one of her ‘predictions’ for Virus XIII.
Kher’s bindi paintings up close were amazing. I felt I was witnessing cells under a microscope, land arial maps of distant lands or swept away across galaxies. They vibrated and felt fluid, like they were growing in front of my eyes, cell proliferation, a disease taking over its host. As a viewer I felt like I could assimilate, become absorbed in the artwork, or pulled through a portal to another dimension, a black hole, powerless to whatever maybe on the other side.
‘The Body is a Place’ felt like witnessing alchemy on Bristol’s historical dockside.
