Bharti Kher (b. 1969, UK, lives and works in New Delhi), works in a wide range of media, encompassing painting, sculpture, drawing and installation. Kher refers to her practice as a search for the chimera. (… clarification added) She seeks visual clues and imagery from her daily life as well as different cultures, creating works that are radically heterogeneous. Often monumental in scale, her works map a tension of identities, social roles and gender. In the linking of the animal and human worlds the artist produces bodies as hybrid forms. Although Kher’s work appears to come from a distant world of fables and myths, it nonetheless takes a critical view of current social phenomena. A leitmotiv throughout the practice is the bindi: a symbol in India of the third eye and a popular fashion accessory. Kher uses it to connect the real and the spiritual/metaphysical worlds and as a link between mind and body. Kher’s iconographic bindi paintings reveal a personal, cultural and spiritual language that speaks eloquently about ritual, repetition and they seem to represent a deliberate sign of resilience. Kher’s works take into account her position and role as occupying the female body and its fragility in relationship to diverse environments and their inherant narratives. Her works touch upon the precarious balance upon which our societies rest and suggest alternative and improbable scenarios; a strategy perhaps for an age seized by political unease and historical anxiety.