Important Notice

"Everything starts from the home, your journey and your consciousness. We always see the big picture and sometimes there is more to learn from the small one." - BHARTI KHER

Best known for her unusual use of bindis, Bharti Kher's work explores the spaces between belonging and classification. Though she grew up in the United Kingdom and moved to India much later, she resists being identified as a diaspora artist,... "Everything starts from the home, your journey and your consciousness. We always see the big picture and sometimes there is more to learn from the small one." - BHARTI KHER

Best known for her unusual use of bindis, Bharti Kher's work explores the spaces between belonging and classification. Though she grew up in the United Kingdom and moved to India much later, she resists being identified as a diaspora artist, preferring instead to "play with the ideas of misinterpretation of culture, or the idea of the authentic." (Artist quoted in a video interview, Kochi Muziris Biennale 2014, online) The Walls Have Ears is one of the artist's first works to explore the bindi motif through painting. Derived from the Sanskrit term for a point, the bindi is associated with the Hindu concept of the third eye, and is traditionally worn by married women. It has now, however, become a mass-produced fashion accessory, and it is this juxtaposition of the symbolic and the material that Kher explores, using repetition and contradictions to create visually striking compositions. In the present lot, the trope of the bindis seems to provide a microscopic view of the eponymous walls, while the presence of a large fly undermines the notion of privacy associated with the bedroom.

The present lot is part of a series titled The Private Softness of Skin, which was first exhibited in New York in 2000. Here, Kher takes the viewer into the interiors of homes, and the objects and material culture that form a crucial part of making a place one's own. "Bharti Kher's artistic project can be said to be autobiographical. The institutions of identity, culture and community, both received and changing, are that which she strives to locate within the home..." (Peter Nagy, Bharti Kher: The Private Softness of Skin, New York: Bose Pacia Modern, 2000) Each room features a curated set of objects that combine traces of the traditional with modern consumer goods. The "painted-collage" format of this series, inspired by Indian hand-painted photographs and Pop Art, serves as a way to explore hybrid and contradictory identities.

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