Jan 11, 2014 – Apr 20, 2014
Curator: Sandhini Poddar
Artist: Bharti Kher
Organizer: Rockbund Art Museum
Support: Rockbund, Galerie Perrotin (Paris, Hong Kong, New York), Helutrans (Shanghai)
In response to the popular demand from the public, the exhibition Bharti Kher: Misdemeanours is now extended till April 20th. The accompanying education programmes will also continue through the extension period, including Curator Tours and talks. Please stay tuned and welcome to join!
Contemporary painter and sculptor Bharti Kher has been engaged with the varying art historical traditions of the readymade, minimalism and abstraction (through repeated gestures and forms), as well as mythology and narrativity for the past twenty years. This fifteen-year survey of Kher’s practice from the early years of the 21st century through to the present — represented by new bodies of work made specifically for the Rockbund Art Museum and its related institutional and cultural histories — constitutes a synthesized overview into a complex and evolving worldview and the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Asia.
For Kher, the central question of identity (as body, gender, language, and motif) is inextricably linked to the question of artifice — as an existential, aesthetic, biological, and ethical trope. Kher’s women in her important photographic suite, the Hybrid series, which includes The hunter and the prophet, chocolate muffin, angel, family portrait, and feather duster (all from 2004), exist in a liminal state between humdrum domesticity and violent phantasmagoria, as their photoshopped selves — part human, part animal — appear both seductive and demure, seemingly in agreement with their given roles, as well as domineering and resistant, having elected to relish in their own duplicitous and multiplying selfhoods. The poetics of the body reveals Kher’s interests in entropy, mutation, and transformation, as witnessed by humans and animals alike. Kher’s series of animal-based works, including Misdemeanours (2006), The skin speaks a language not its own (2006) and An absence of assignable cause (2007), together may constitute what Benjamin H.D. Buchloh has termed as “the embodiment of the spectacularized uncanny par excellence.” For Kher, agents such as folly, accident, satire, and play go to the heart of what it means to be a practicing artist, and to relate to the world through art.
Rockbund Art Museum exhibition includes a selection of twenty works comprised of sculptures, Kher’s much-celebrated bindi paintings, photographs, site-specific installations, and an outdoor mural consisting of a gigantic multi-paneled bindi painting, modeled after Kher’s 2007 bindi diptych, Target Queen. These works include loans from leading private and public institutions internationally as well as new commissions.
