Body Of Work

Her art is visceral, provocative and strong—as is her voice. One of the most important contemporary artists from India, BHARTI KHER tells SHAHNAZ SIGANPORIA about her obsession with the body, why she refuses to be a hamster on a wheel and how women artists are going to change the art world

 

For some reason angst is usually associated with Holden Caulfield-style scruffy young adults. Bharti Kher is in her late forties, her body of work prolific and equally prodigious. She’s even got her trademark in place—the use of the bindi (across mediums) to manipulate the proverbial third eye into reversing the gaze, and her use of hybridity to question convention. Kher is laidback when we begin, delighting in her art and her studio-based processes. She’s currently between her exhibit at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the group show, The Body In Colour, at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art, New York, scheduled for April 2018. But as the conversation takes a turn toward the world outside, the angst rightfully barges in, and one of the most vocal Indian artists declares, “I have no voice,” echoing the frustrations of living in an increasingly chauvinist environment, when freedom of expression is under threat and feminism is still a bad word. Over pots of Earl Grey tea, under the double-height ceilings of her warehouse-style Gurugram studio, Kher fills me in about making art in the best and worst of times.

Was your residency at the Gardner Museum a way for you to balance the demands of the art market with your artistic process?