Lot 80: BHARTI KHER (B. 1969)

BHARTI KHER (B. 1969) IMPOSTER Executed in 2004 Fiberglass, skin, gold plated necklace 26 by 41 by 26 in. (66 cm by 106 cm by 66 cm.)

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, Bharti Kher: An Absence of an Assignable Cause, November - December 2007

Gallery Ske, Bangaluru, Bharti Kher: quasi-, mim-, near-, semi-, -ish, -like, October - November 2004

Ranjit Hoskote, Bharti Kher, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, 2007, p.176-181

Art critic Ranjit Hoskote remarks: "Bharti Kher's works ought to be signposted with mandatory warnings. You will meet with the hazard of disruptive beauty here ... you will confront the erotic as a net of pleasure woven through with an anxiety that approaches terror. Or you might be stopped by a pair of grimacing apes, their hirsute nakedness marking a declaration of war despite the accoutrements of civilization they display; one is mantled in a pelt and the other wears a golden necklace; on reflection, these objects seem like tribute exacted from some unwary traveler by these twin regents of vagrancy ... Probing further into Kher's domain, we encounter the giant forms that grow in her mind, forms nominally associated with the animal, the aquatic, and the arboreal kingdoms, but which exert over us the surreal authority of dream constructs. They claim our attention by the sheer insistence and the majestic incongruity of their presence.

"Kher has had a longstanding interest in the bestiarium, rather than zoology as a purely scientific interest. The interest is at once empathetic toward other sentient beings, ecologically informed, and alert to the nuances of inherited and potential symbolism. On the evidence of nearly two decades of work, it seems clear that one of Kher's key projects is the re-enchantment of the animal as a symbol, a symptom, a guide; she wishes to retrieve the animal for the fabular realm, for the activity of symbol-making, which she marks as her resistance against a world in which animals have been reduced to brutalized laboratory slaves or unwilling zoo-bound entertainers.

"In Kher's handbook of xenography, wildness or mutations are conditions that prompt rage, hatred or stigmatization because they cannot immediately be understood or neutralized; so that species could also stand for race, in her treatment, and animal ferocity or desire could represent choices that cannot be contained within the prevailing definition of normality." (Ranjit Hoskote, Bharti Kher, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, 2007, pp.7-10)