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“The dots are virtually kinetic. It’s a space in which politics, violence, sexuality, manipulation… everything goes on… There are many narratives.” - BHARTI KHER

Inspiration struck Bharti Kher in the bazaars of Delhi where a woman wearing a bindi with an interesting shape caught her eye. The bindi represents the third eye and the conventional circular bindi shares its shape with the bindu, a meditative... “The dots are virtually kinetic. It’s a space in which politics, violence, sexuality, manipulation… everything goes on… There are many narratives.” - BHARTI KHER

Inspiration struck Bharti Kher in the bazaars of Delhi where a woman wearing a bindi with an interesting shape caught her eye. The bindi represents the third eye and the conventional circular bindi shares its shape with the bindu, a meditative form in Indian metaphysics which is also a metaphor for the beginning of all life. In the words of the artist, “The dot is like a universe… it’s so loaded and super-clichéd, it’s unbelievable. It’s also a homage of sorts. The form is very alluring.” (Artist quoted in “Agent Provocateur: Bharti Kher”, Anupa Mehta, India 20: Conversations with Contemporary Artists, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing in association with Alekhya Foundation, 2007, p. 60) Kher also felt drawn to the recurring collective ritual of female presentation encoded in putting on a bindi. Art critic Ranjit Hoskote notes that at the same time, Kher “also saw, through eyes attuned to Op Art, Pop Art and Minimalism, the paintings of Lichtenstein and Polke, that differential arrays of bindis could essay the renewal of a social abstraction in an ethos where the abstract has been primarily the domain of the mystically inclined or those approaching transcendence from the launch-pad of the landscape.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Pursuit of Extreme Propositions: Recent Works by Bharti Kher”, Bharti Kher, New York: Jack Shainman Gallery, 2007, p. 16)

The present lot is an abstract work by the artist where she ingeniously uses bindis to reference satellite photographs of terrain and maps of demographic clusters often used when talking about population changes. It “invokes the miscegenation that attends the crossing of borders and the merging of ancestries”. (Hoskote, p. 17) Kher, as the British child of Indian parents who moved back to India as an adult, has a keen understanding of how migration disrupts received notions of identity. The “allusive images” of the works where she applies bindis on flat surfaces draw attention to the mass migration that creates our worlds. (Hoskote, pp. 16-17)

The process of the creation of works like the present lot is crucial for Kher. The application of the prefabricated bindis is undertaken by her and a team of specially trained assistants. She is careful to redirect her assistants’ energies to channel an easy, uninterrupted focus demanded by her “action works”. (Artist quoted in Mehta, p. 62) As the artist views the Indian woman’s daily act of putting on a bindi as marking time, special consideration is placed on the tempo of the application. Kher and her assistants apply the bindis without the aid of a preparatory drawing since she places a greater emphasis on the act itself; the busy patterns bursting with energy are a result of concentrating on the consecutive application of each bindi over a period. As she says, “These are not designs or patterns. The action is very important. The act of sticking is a validation. The more you stick, the more you validate… the closer it becomes to you. In some ways, I’ve made the material mine.” (Artist quoted in Mehta, p. 62)

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