Disturbing hybrids, straight from a horror movie set? At Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), Bharti Kher’s sculptures combine animal and human figures of Hindu gods and goddesses, and Western art historical sculptures. Yet each work carries its own powerful story relating to the feminine body.
Kher named the exhibition at YSP “Alchemies,” she said, to evoke “the potential of the body to be magical, to carry within an inner force, the life force of energy.” This major exhibition spans over 24 years of her career, spanning old and new works made from 2000 to present. While she has shown regularly in the U.K. with a major exhibition at the Arnolfini in Bristol in 2022, a work in Frieze Sculpture in 2018, and an exhibition at the Freud Museum London in 2016, this is her most extensive museum presentation in the country to date.
It also follows on from major museum shows at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2020, as well as regular presentations at the three galleries that represent her internationally—Hauser & Wirth, Perrotin, and Nature Morte, the latter of which most recently showed her works in India in 2021.
Symbols of East meet West
At YSP, the largest gallery is filled with Kher’s trademark sculptural theme—female figures cast in varying styles and in poses that include standing, squatting, and on all fours—hybridized bodies that have been a part of Kher’s practice for over a decade, with the sculptures in the room dating from 2012 to 2024.
Kher’s Indian heritage combined with her experience growing up in the U.K. means she’s able to combine both Western and Eastern symbolism in these works (she now lives between India and the U.K.). In her practice, she draws on varied influences, like animal-human hybrid sculptures from the Harappan civilization, who lived in the Indus Valley from 3300 BCE, or Kali, the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction. One sculpture holds a replica of the skull of the oldest known hominid, Lucy, in one hand, and a quintessentially British teacup in the other. The works are presented on a raised platform, intended to evoke the structure of a Hindu temple, she said.
Hybrid sculptures with a clear message
These hybrids sometimes take a more overtly political approach, calling for harmony across religious division. Mother and child; Amar, Akbar, Anthony (2017), for instance, references a 1970s film named after these three Hindu, Muslim, and Christian names. It was, Kher said, “released to promote religious harmony and nationhood in India.” This, however, is no longer the case, she said: “Over the past 15 years or so, we have seen a very divisive and religiously political agenda in India that has been incredibly problematic.”
Not all of her figurative sculptures are fantastical. Her six women (2014) are all full-body casts based on sex workers who have had children—a work that was shown at the Sydney Biennale in 2016. They are not sexualized portrayals, but instead tender and intimate portraits of mothers whose bodies have been commodified. For Kher, who was then in her forties, it was important to portray women who had lived as long as she has, even if their lives have been very different. “I wanted them to be my age…to have maturity, a matter-of-factness about their life and who they are,” she said.
Early abstract experiments
Kher did not always make figurative sculptures, as seen by some of her earlier abstract works. The YSP show includes the deaf room (2010–12), a large room-like installation created by melting down 10 tons of glass bangles into bricks, with space for one or two people to step inside. Kher explained that the work is a homage to “the inter-communal riots that took place in India in 2002 that came as a direct result of religious antagonism that continues in India today. A train was set on fire and it was blamed on the Muslim community and over the course of the next five days around 1,000 people were murdered.” This monument towers over the visitor in blood red, reflecting the intensity and horror of what happened, but is also a quiet space where visitors can reflect on that dark time in history.
More bangles, this time in a non-melted form, hang above visitors’ heads. Kher said she sees them as a “bloodline that runs from right to left across the building…an artery, a heartline, a vagus nerve” that holds her exhibition together. It’s a common motif in her shows, but at 53 meters long, this is the longest one she’s made.
Next to the deaf room sits a cube of stacked radiators called the hot winds that blow from the West (2011). These radiators sit on top of one another, defunct and rusting. Shipped to Kher’s studio in Delhi from Indiana, they represent, for Kher, the decline of Western influence on the wider world. Historically, she said, “The West dictated political as well as economical, and sociological impact on the rest of the world.” Now, she said, those winds are changing and are “no longer as strong or reliable as they were.”
Sculpted goddesses of female power
Meanwhile, in the YSP’s exterior spaces, Kher has installed her series “The Intermediaries,” which she refers to as the three goddesses. One represents Mother Earth, another combines masculine and feminine aesthetic traits, and another work outside draws inspiration from the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis. For Kher, this final work, Ancestor (2022), was particularly important. “I’d never seen a public sculpture with a sari, and this was my chance to make a really powerful Indian woman based on Artemis,” she said.
What’s clear is that her boundless curiosity about humanity and its varied representations and cultures helps to inform her work: “I’m interested in politics, religion, architecture, reading, brain development and nanotechnology,” she said. “I make work with my whole body. I see it, I hear it, I taste it, I smell it, I feel it…the human body is so much more than the sum of its parts.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/CAsjhKn
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