Alchemies

Yorkshire Sculpture Park 

22 June 2024 – 27 Apr 2025

Review by John Siddique

Entering Bharti Kher’s Alchemies, you feel an immediate sense of a pull in your stomach before your mind kicks in. There is a visceral nature to these pieces, a sense of personal and communal multiplicity, of divided countries, and a sense of identities beyond the limited binaries of our day, a journey of felt questions.

The first piece in the indoor galleries that you encounter is ‘The Deaf Room’, which responds to the riots that took place in Gujarat in 2002, in which over 1000 people died. The piece is based on a bakery that burned down, killing everyone inside. It is made entirely from tonnes of glass bangles melted into bricks and laid into walls held together insubstantially by clay. This is a statement piece reflecting on violence against women, especially against women of colour, and how the world is too often deaf to it. Voices deadened, lives uncounted. You should be able to be safe in your own home, but The Deaf Room speaks of that illusion in a way that no words can. In today’s context, you cannot help but feel the profound deafness and muteness against Palestine and the lack of equity in the reality of the unending industrial-military complex war-machine.

There is an understanding in Kher’s work that is often missing from what we have come to expect from art as it has followed its conceptual and global financial asset phases, which is that art pertains to the sacred in us, in the fullness of our humanity. Her pieces ‘Cloud Walker’, ‘The Fallow’, ‘Animus Mundi’ and others don’t shy away from this sacredness in any way, but perhaps the most effecting and truly spiritual piece in the whole exhibition is ‘Six Women’, in which Kher has cast six women in white plaster, each of whom sits on a wooden stool. ‘The skin holds memories’, Kher says. The six women are not idealised. They sit with their hands on their laps, each clearly over the age of 40, each has had children, and each is a sex worker. However, they are not posed to highlight their sexuality – rather, you feel the ordinariness and factuality of each life simply sitting with you in the room. There is profundity, strength and tenderness here; the intimacy and honesty of this piece makes you question the memories held in your own skin: the silent memories of betrayals, lovings, losses, and belonging. Kher says of her process: ‘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.’ 

Writing informs Kher’s work very deeply, so much so that she has created a recommended books area in an interactive gallery area: a collection of Rumi, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, The Upanishads, Mahasweta Devi’s Breast Stories, as well as books on symbolism and hermetic traditions. These books help inform the viewer of the journey unfolding here, which is personal, mythic, political, and artistic. Kher was born in Britain in 1969, which gave her a sense of being different, of being the so-called ‘outsider’ but found that when she moved to India, she was able to take ownership of this sense of difference to shape her practice, through which she began to uncover the realities of the multiplicity within herself and the world she experiences, as well as the wholeness and unity of her own disparate parts and those in the cultures and societies she inhabits. You can almost feel the spirit of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s spirit in the necessity of these explorations and reclamations through the transcendent nature of meeting the ordinary with honesty. You can feel her take on Warhol’s sensibility in the use of immediate symbols and cultures, and you can sense Baldwin’s urging to always honour the complexity of our humanity.

Outside in the park grounds, stand four of Kher’s large-scale works belonging to a series called ‘Intermediaries’ These are fluid beings representing the potentials of a person, an animal or an object beyond the name and identity assigned to them and the projected rules of reality. Each piece is worthy of spending time with. ‘Ancestor’ explores the necessity for a mother figure in this time of instability and polarity. ‘The Intermediate Family’ touches into psychological and mystical forms through its assemblage, calling to the imagination and the inner spaces in the viewer. But it is the final piece of the exhibition Djinn, the most recent of Kher’s works here, that perhaps shows where her journey is leading her. Djinns are playful and often dangerous trickster spirits that can take any form. They are shifting, unconstrained and surprising things, and they come with both the art of magic and promises but often leave you somehow unsettled. ‘Djinn’ sits high up on a knoll, overlooking the whole landscape out towards the motorway; it is a dull-coloured, unexpected creature with a massive bunch of bananas in place of its head. As you turn to look out to the highway from the Djinn’s knoll, you find that something in you, for which there are no words, has been changed by the art; that something essential is being pointed out by your meeting with the work.

https://ysp.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/bharti-kher

John Siddique

John Siddique is a sacred teacher and writer.