Bharti Kher: ‘Alchemies’ at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
“When I make the work in the studio, so many forces are at play: the material and its narrative and needs, my hands and their energies, the space and its dynamic as a holder of potential. The bodies and remnants of voices that leave their traces and essence in the body casts. Positives and negatives fly around me. All of it helps me see better, to sense the temperature, to hear what is physical, but to make the work sing I have let go of all of it. And that’s how the alchemies of the studio come into being”.
Bharti Kher, Installation view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2024
Courtesy the artist and Yorkshire Sculpture Park
©Jonty Wilde
Clare Lilley, YSP Director:
“Bharti Kher: Alchemies headlines a year of programming that is driven by international female artists. This ambitious exhibition brings an important artist to new UK audiences and we look forward to seeing visitors enjoy and experience such exceptional work. In YSP’s unique setting, we are able to show both the intimate in the galleries and the monumental in the open air, creating stimulating conversations between artworks and people and igniting ideas and the imagination.”
Upcoming event:
The Artist in conversation with YSP Director Clare Lilley, YSP, 9 November 2024
Bharti Kher, Alchemies
A glimmering stack of 20,000 glass bangles, suspended horizontally, runs the length of the Underground Gallery at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The largest iteration of Bharti Kher’s Bloodline installation, it connects the three interior spaces that house a powerful array of her artworks brought together for ‘Alchemies’, Kher’s most significant UK exhibition to date.
Bharti Kher, Bloodline, 2000-2024
Courtesy the artist and Yorkshire Sculpture Park
©Charlie Moore
Kher knows how to be master of her materials. In The deaf room (2001-12), bangles are smelted and set into bricks that are heaped up to construct an open-topped cubicle. The structure radiates a lacquer-like quality, yet the luxuriant minimalism is given an edge by the rugged seams of clay that hold it all together. Enter the hollow and the cavity silences the world beyond, creating a stillness that is Kher’s homage to the many Muslim women murdered in India’s 2002 Gujarat riots.
Bharti Kher, The Deaf Room, 2001-2012
Courtesy the artist and Yorkshire Sculpture Park
©Jonty Wilde
Honouring womanhood, in its many dimensions, is fundamental to this show. A pantheon of Kher’s hybrid sculptures, sprawled across a low-lying plinth, is rooted in the divine. A Dakini, a cloud-walking Tibetan mythological figure, is not far from And all the while the benevolent slept (2008), a decapitated, squatting female with thin wires shooting from her neck in reference to Chinnamastā, the Hindu goddess capable of giving and taking life.
19th century depiction of Chinnamastā
Bharti Kher, And all the while the benevolent slept, 2008
Courtesy the artist and Yorkshire Sculpture Park
©Jonty Wilde
A classical nude, inspired by Bernini and akin to Venus de Milo, is also cited and assimilated into Kher’s world of animism, imbalance and possibility. Wearing a cow’s head like a hat, bindis surge across the animal and escape down the torso. A sari drenched in resin becomes like glass, and the frozen material, fragile enough to fracture, counterintuitively swaddles her legs and spews from her mouth.
Kher urges us to see not just our material world, but also the body, as magical and full of force. Her outdoor works of blown-up and modified golu dolls loom large and lively.
Bharti Kher, Ancestor, 2022
Courtesy the artist and Yorkshire Sculpture Park
©Charlie Moore
Bharti Kher, Ancestor, 2022
Courtesy the artist and Yorkshire Sculpture Park
©Charlie Moore
She also uses plain plaster in the muted and sombre work, Six Women (2012–14), to cast and capture the inner essence of sex workers she met in Kolkata. They were all mothers and all the same age as her at the time. As Kher explains, “The casting is a tender process and I wanted to explore the transference of energies. The body is a container and there is so much more to us than this physical thing.”
C R-K
Bharti Kher, Six Women, 2012-2014
Courtesy the artist and Yorkshire Sculpture Park
©Jonty Wilde
Bharti Kher has donated a limited-edition print – Mimesis – in support of YSP.
All proceeds support YSP’s charitable mission to encourage access to outstanding art and creative learning for everyone. To purchase an edition please contact YSP using the button below:
While you’re here:
On 12 September 2024 The Hayward Gallery are unveiling a major new outdoor-commission by Bharti Kher.
Target Queen will be on display in the gallery until September 2027 – (first time I’ve had to write that date…)
“My outdoor work is a key part of my practice, so I couldn’t be more delighted to be working with a space as renowned as the Hayward Gallery to present this work for the first time at a London institution. Target Queen will be a bold, vibrant and powerful artwork that calls for greater representation of femininity and divinity, also as an exciting exploration of how the two intersect.”
- BK
