Indian painter and sculptor, Bharti Kher’s artistic practice is nonetheless highly diverse in its approach to materials, methods and subject matter. Bharti has lived since the early 1990s in India, where she explores the construction of culture and identity. Bharti uses the forms and ideas of minimalism, abstraction and the readymade to engage with a range of ideas, including gender politics, language, mythology, hybridity, dislocation, transmogrification and narrative.At the 20th Biennale of Sydney, Bharti is showcasing ‘Six Women’, 2013–14, a series of life-sized, sitting female sculptures, cast from real women in her New Delhi studio.Critically, the vulnerability of the women stems only in part from their nakedness; Bharti’s sitters were sex workers, paid by the artist to sit for her, in a self-conscious transaction of money and bodily experience. Throughout the process, Bharti asked herself: ‘If the body can carry the memory of other bodies as well, what does this mean? Can a body carry narratives that don’t belong to it?’ Located within the Embassy of the Real, Bharti’s sculptures address the physicality and inherent vulnerability of the body and quietly challenge our perceptions of the body in contemporary culture. As tender portraits of women, with their resolved sense of calm and gentle rolls of flesh, the works distil a very human set of emotions, beyond simply the rendering of their figurative form.The Biennale of Sydney with the title ‘The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed’ is Asia Pacific region’s largest contemporary visual arts event featuring 83 artists hailing from 35 countries and is presented free to the public across seven venues or ‘Embassies of Thought’ and multiple ‘in-between spaces’ around the inner city, from Friday 18 March until 5 June 2016. The exhibition is supplemented by a comprehensive schedule of public programs including daily guided tours, artist and curator-led talks, lectures, workshops, salons, reading groups and gatherings.Talking about the sculptor Bharti says, ‘It’s a strange and cathartic process, casting. When you caress the skin and rub the plaster gently over and over so as all the pores and creases are etched and filled with plaster, it’s like encasing and mummifying a living being. You are trying to capture their breath, to find the imprint of their minds and thoughts, and the secrets of the soul. What the cast carries, only the model can give. I have no idea what people think about when their heads are encased in plaster. The head is truly the most challenging and awkward part for them. It is always the last part. It involves complete trust and absolute calm in the model. Everyone seems to summon into being who they need to be to complete the casting.’Bharti sees the body as a literal and metaphorical site for the construction of ideas around gender, mythology and narrative. In the mid-2000s, she began to create a series of strangely beautiful, but quietly grotesque, hybrid figurative sculptures of women that fused human and animal body parts. Kher described them as ‘mythical urban goddesses, creatures who came out of the contradiction of the idea of femininity or the idea of womanhood, she is the goddess, the housewife, the mother, the whore, the mistress, the lover, the sister - everything’.“The ‘Embassies of Thought’ in the 20th Biennale have been conceived as temporary settings without set borders, representing transient homes for constellations of thought. The themes associated with each of these ‘embassies’ are inspired by the individual histories of each venue, whilst the ‘in between’ spaces speak to one of the key ideas in this Biennale exploring the distinction between the virtual and the physical worlds. We’re asking visitors to consider our interaction with the digital world, as well our displacement from and occupation of spaces and land, along with the interconnections between politics and financial power structures,” Artistic Director Stephanie Rosenthal says while speaking about The Biennale of Sydney show.More than half of the 200 artworks in the exhibition have been specially commissionedfor the 20th Biennale of Sydney. More than a third of artworks are presented at venues inSydney’s inner west. In addition to artworks presented across the seven embassies, the 20th Biennale commissioned twelve site-specific projects taking place at locations throughout inner Sydney, including a new work by Swedish artist Bo Christian Larsson that will unfold over the course of three months at Camperdown Cemetery. In a former gallery space in Redfern, artist collective Brown Council (Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore, Kelly Doley and Diana Smith) present a new participatory performance about how we recall the past and imagine the future.Bharti Kher has exhibited extensively internationally, with solo shows including ‘Bharti Kher: Misdemeanours’, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2014); ‘Bharti Kher’, Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, London (2012); and ‘Reveal the secrets that you seek’, Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah (2012). Major group exhibitions include ‘Whorled Explorations’, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014; ‘Seeing through light’, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (2014); and ‘Paris-Delhi-Bombay’, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2011).Bharti Kher’s sculpture will be on display at the 20th Biennale of Sydney from March 18 to June 5 2016.Follow@ARTINFOIndia
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