Important Notice

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.

This is possibly the reason the artist "…picked on the bindi as a metaphor for her concerns. For the world at large, the 'dot' on the forehead singles out women as Indian. But Bharti subverts this 'exotic' symbol and thereby the outsider's gaze to talk about more pressing women's issues. For her the paradox lies in the fact that the bindi with its traditional and spiritual connotations of the third eye, proudly flashed on a woman's forehead, does not in any way empower her to 'see' her oppression in a largely male dominated society. Instead, the bindi has been robbed of its bite and rendered a toothless symbol of consumer fashion or as Kher would put it 'a religious token gone secular'" (Meera Menezes, "Is She Fish or Fowl", Art India, Vol. 7, Issue 4, 2002, p. 52).

Kher often refers to her mixed media works with bindis, like the present lot contoured with organic flows of contemporary round and arrow-shaped ones, as 'action paintings'. Titled 'Rugged Terrain', this large work involves thousands of bindis meticulously stuck onto a panel one-by-one to create current- like swirls or migratory flows that seem to ascend and disperse from its lower margins. The sense of movement that the bindis create is at once complex and rhythmically calming, symbolic perhaps of the dichotomies and state of transition or flux that have marked Indian society since its liberalization and globalization in the early 1990s.

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. Explicating the symbolism of the bindi in her work, Kher says, "The bindi is a representation of the third eye - a fantastic narrative is already built into the symbol. There's the reference to a mass action that goes on across the whole country, every single day, the act of placing a bindi on the forehead. You place something yourself upon yourself as you look at your reflection: the idea that you'll see the world differently today is affirmative…The dot is like a universe…it's so loaded and super-clichéd, it's unbelievable…It's a space in which politics, violence, sexuality, manipulation…everything goes on…There are many narratives" (as quoted in Anupa Mehta, "Agent Provocateur", India 20: Conversations with Contemporary Artists, Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, 2007, p. 60).

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