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Bharti Kher's is an art of dislocation and transience, reflecting her own, largely itinerant life. Born and raised in England, the artist moved to New Delhi in the early 1990s after her formal training in the field, and today, like most of her contemporaries, frequently travels the world attending to exhibitions of her work. Consequently, the concept of home as the location of identity and culture is constantly challenged in her body of work. ... Bharti Kher's is an art of dislocation and transience, reflecting her own, largely itinerant life. Born and raised in England, the artist moved to New Delhi in the early 1990s after her formal training in the field, and today, like most of her contemporaries, frequently travels the world attending to exhibitions of her work. Consequently, the concept of home as the location of identity and culture is constantly challenged in her body of work.

In her art, Kher gives form to the slightly strange and slightly awkward encounters with the daily rituals of life. Her vision makes the banal wondrous and the quotidian unusual, sometimes even disturbing. Her use of found objects, such as mirrors or furniture, is informed by her own position as an artist located between geographic and social milieus. Her way of working is exploratory: surveying, looking, collecting, and transforming. By bringing to attention the overlooked world with its everyday acts, such as applying the bindi in Indian culture, confessing as a ritual or looking at oneself in a mirror, and then re-assessing their meaning, Kher's work repositions the viewer's relationship with the object (Bharti Kher. inevitable undeniable necessary, Hauser & Wirth press release, 2010, not paginated).

The clusters and patterns of multi-coloured, mass-produced, stick-on bindis in Kher's work represent both custom, which is often inflexible, and the dynamic ways in which it is produced and consumed today. An arcane symbol of fertility, the contemporary stick-on bindi is a popular cosmetic device available in different shapes and colours and is an integral part of Kher's oeuvre. Exploiting their cultural and aesthetic dualisms, Kher uses bindis as an epidermal filter to transform objects. As shimmering signs in the form of waves, constellations, and spirals, Kher's bindis mediate between codes and symbols and the ritual marking of time (Ibid.).

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