Part of the British Indian diaspora, Bharati Kher fosters a fluid duality in her ouevre, as she now lives and works in India. This oscillating cultural and artistic identity is possibly “why she has picked on the bindi as a metaphor for her concerns. For the world at large, the ‘dot’ on the forehead singles out women as Indian. But Bharti subverts this ‘exotic’ symbol and thereby the outsider’s gaze to talk about more pressing...
Part of the British Indian diaspora, Bharati Kher fosters a fluid duality in her ouevre, as she now lives and works in India. This oscillating cultural and artistic identity is possibly “why she has picked on the bindi as a metaphor for her concerns. For the world at large, the ‘dot’ on the forehead singles out women as Indian. But Bharti subverts this ‘exotic’ symbol and thereby the outsider’s gaze to talk about more pressing women’s issues. For her the paradox lies in the fact that the bindi with its traditional and spiritual connotations of the third eye, proudly flashed on a women’s forehead, does not in any way empower her to ‘see’ her oppression in a largely male dominated society. Instead, the bindi has been robbed of its bite and rendered a toothless symbol of consumer fashion or as Kher would put it “a religious token gone secular”.” (Meera Menezes, Is she Fish or Fowl, Art India, Q4 2002, p.52).
In this work, the artist has used the traditional round bindis, ubiquitous in both an urban and rural Indian context, creating a spiraling visual conundrum for the viewer in separating the role of the individual bindi parts and the representational whole – a metaphor for Kher’s concerns of sex, gender, race and individual vs. societal identity.