Contemporary artist Bharti Kher will present her first major solo exhibition in Asia at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. Representing a survey of Kher’s work from the early 2000s to the present, Misdemeanours is organised so as to occupy all six floors of the museum’s galleries. The exhibition includes a selection of twenty pieces consisting of sculptures, Kher’s celebrated bindi paintings, photographs, installations and a large outdoor bindi mural.
Commonly recurring themes within Kher’s work are hybridity, transmogrification, ethics, gender politics, globalisation, and the interlocking relationship between animal and man. The exhibition contains work especially made for Rockbund Art Museum, including two site-specific installations that act as conceptual and literal “skins” that encase the museum’s façade and merge two consecutive exhibition spaces. These installations mirror the double role of the bind—a vital motif in Kher’s work—through its ability to decorate and attract attention, as well as to obscure the gaze.
Although Kher’s work is diverse in materiality, sensibility, approach, and subject matter, she displays an intrinsic understanding of and appreciation for human drama and contemporary life, emphasised clearly through this fifteen year survey of her work. She has lived and worked in New Delhi since the early 1990s.
Bharti Kher – Sing to them that will listen (detail), 2008
by Louise Lui
Bharti Kher: Misdemeanours will is at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai from January 11 – March 30, 2014