Bharti Kher

‘Mythologies’

Copenhagen, Denmark

22 August 2025 – 8 March 2026

In the museum’s largest exhibition to date, international contemporary artist Bharti Kher challenges our conventional perceptions of body, gender, identity, and culture.

Mythologies mirror our innermost thoughts, feelings and conflicts. They shed light on how, throughout history, we have dealt with our way of being in the world and our relationship to existential questions about life and the phenomena of nature. 

The Mythologies exhibition shows Bharti Kher’s extensive sculptural practice. The artworks address topics of identity, memory, transformation, and the body. Through a visual language that combines objects from various geographical and cultural areas, her works carry traces of lived life. Mythology, nature, and everyday stories meet, overlap, and come together. The many layers of meaning in Kher’s universe simultaneously create a connection to our individual lives and a sense of a larger collective existence. 

Castings in a wide range of materials play a central role in her practice. For Kher, castings carry both an outer and inner imprint – a presence and an essence of the cast subject – and bear witness to the body’s central role in her work. The body is the tangible, sensory site of our experiences and the physical and symbolic centre of our notions about identity, gender, stories and mythology. The idea of castings as vessels for something more than just form can be traced back to ancient Egypt, where plaster death masks represented the hope that the soul of the deceased would remain captured within the cast. 

The Roman poet Ovid’s (43 BCE–17 CE) Metamorphoses is an important source of inspiration to both Kher and Thorvaldsen. This cycle of poems describes the ability of mythological heroes and gods to transmute. In Ovid’s work and in Graeco-Roman mythology, identity is not a fixed state. Instead, transformation is often the result of collapse: when something is dissolved or destroyed, something new may arise and take shape. 

With a diversity of materials and by drawing on various mythologies from around the world, Kher’s sculptures reflect a global world in constant motion, where everything is connected in a cycle of continuous transformation. Like Kher’s sculptures, we are forever changing. 

Mythologies is Bharti Khers first solo exhibition in Denmark. 

Photos: David Stjernholm.

'Bharti Kher'

St Ives, UK

1 February – 5 May 2025

Enter a realm where everyday life meets the mystical in this one room exhibition by contemporary artist Bharti Kher. A selection of Kher’s sculptures, paintings and drawings are being shown together as a complement to the exhibition Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds. The two artists share a fascination with magic, spirituality, mythology and extra-dimensionality.

Some of Kher’s works are hybrid, part-human figures that combine the everyday with the extraordinary, often incorporating specific cultural symbols such as the sari and the bindi. Others use precariously perched objects or contrasting painted forms to reflect on notions of balance and the relationship between the body and its surroundings.

Born in the UK (1969) and based between New Delhi and London, Kher draws on a range of philosophies, theologies and mythologies from different cultures. She initiates a dialogue between metaphysical ideas and the material pursuits of making. Comparing her practice to alchemy – a natural philosophy centred on material and spiritual transformation – she taps into the magical potential of objects.

Photo: © Tate (Josh Croll)

'Bharti Kher. Alchemies'

Wakefield, UK

Sat 22 Jun 2024 – Mon 5 May 2025

Displayed in the Underground Gallery and surrounding gardens, Alchemies was an unmissable, powerful exhibition of sculpture and 2D work by one of the world’s leading contemporary artists.

The title of the exhibition refers to Alchemy – an ancient practice that included trying to change ordinary metal into gold, and Bharti Kher’s work has these ideas of magical transformation at its heart.

Mythology plays an essential role and is a major source of inspiration. Stories of imagined creatures and spirits who live between worlds, bodies and time align perfectly with Kher’s thinking. She blurs boundaries between animals, humans, nature and objects. The results are often hybrid beings that combine the everyday with the imaginary and the extraordinary. When visiting the light-filled indoor gallery you will find a powerful group of hybrid figures gathered together – part women, part animals, part goddesses.

Many of these sculptures are cast from real bodies of women known to the artist. Kher describes these beings as “mythical urban goddesses” who are, “part truth, and part fiction, part me, and part you”.

Warrior with Cloak and Shield conveys the ability to be strong and vulnerable at the same time. Her shield is a huge banana leaf and her cloak is a shirt hanging from her enormous antlers. Neither appear capable of protecting her. Although her antlers are cumbersome and would impede her movement, they give her an air of magic. She is a contradictory, mysterious, and a quietly powerful presence.

Cloud Walker is inspired by the Dakinis of Tibetan mythology. Meaning ‘sky dweller’ or ‘sky dancer’, Dakinis inhabit the skies and embody all things feminine. They are manifestations of energy and truth who can be peaceful or wrathful. Cloud Walker is a fierce and compassionate divinity that exists between worlds, between sleeping and waking, and between life and death.

Outside in the adjacent gardens stood four giant bronze works, belonging to a series called the Intermediaries. The series began with small works made from clay figurines called golu dolls from Southern India. Golu dolls are traditionally displayed in people’s homes as part of the Navaratri festival and represent a colourful celebration of life.

The Intermediaries pays homage to generational family connections. Although made in bronze so they can withstand the weather, most of these huge, scaled-up sculptures are made to look like the original small clay figures they are based on. They are made to appear worn, as though paint has rubbed off in places through years of use, like an old family heirloom.

Ancestor, a mother figure with the heads of 23 children emerging out of her body, is described by Kher as “a mythical and powerful female force that pays homage to the generations before and after her’’.

At the top of the garden, the five-metre-high work Djinn stood majestically overlooking the landscape beyond. Kher describes the work as an “energy centre” around which everything revolves. The playful yet powerful figure has an enormous bunch of bananas in place of a head. This sculpture is a new development in the Intermediaries series, made especially for the exhibition at YSP.

Photos: Jonty Wilde

'Bharti Kher. Target Queen'

London, UK

12 Sep 2024 – 12 Sep 2027

A new commission by British-Indian artist Bharti Kher features supersized bindis, interacting playfully with the iconic architecture of the Hayward Gallery.

In Target Queen, Bharti Kher references the bindi, which is worn by South Asian women as a cultural and spiritual marker representing the third eye. The target-like motifs each measure three metres in diameter and cover two sides of the Hayward Gallery – to be seen from Belvedere Road and Waterloo Bridge.

In this commission, Kher reimagines the concentric circle, a potent motif that not only reflects a cosmic vision but also explores the cyclical nature of life, capturing the interplay between creation and dissolution. Kher’s mural transforms the bindi into a powerful emblem for the Mother goddess, embedding both spiritual resonance and a feminine energy into the brutalist building.

Kher’s artistic practice is renowned for how it explores the boundaries between humanity and nature, ecology and politics. Her sculptures are often crafted from found objects that carry their own histories.

These objects are precariously assembled, often hung, propped and suspended, and are stripped of their conventional meanings, leaving them open to reinterpretation and enchantment. The resulting works are alluring, abstract compositions that challenge and captivate, reflecting a world filled with abstract beauty and latent magic.

Target Queen is generously supported by the Hayward Gallery Commissioning Committee, Kate and Ajay Agarwal, and Hauser & Wirth.

Photos: Jo Underhill

'Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists'

Seoul, South Korea

Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists attempts a new examination of the contemporary meaning of post‒1960s art by Asian women from the perspective of ‘corporeality.’ It was developed as part of an Asian art project by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), which has carried out comparative research and exhibitions on Asian contemporary art beyond national borders. The body is a place where various ideologies and situations intersect, and it is also a locus that reveals difference and diversity. This exhibition assembles around 130 works by women artists from 11 Asian countries to explore this theme.

'Bharti Kher. The Body is a Place'

Bristol, UK

In autumn 2022 internationally renowned artist Bharti Kher (born in England in 1969 and living in New Delhi, India, since 1993), returned to the southwest of England with a major solo exhibition - The Body is a Place - exploring her alchemical practice through drawing, sculpture and the spaces that lie in-between.

The exhibition followed the unveiling of Kher’s 18-foot-tall painted bronze sculpture Ancestor in New York in September 2022, and her celebrated installation at this year’s Venice Biennale in the lyrical setting of The Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello.

Featuring a body of previously unseen drawings, created during residencies in Somerset in 2017 and 2019, The Body is a Place revealed the cyclical nature of Kher’s work. Looking at drawing as part of a wider practice which gathers ‘a world of objects and a world of words’, the exhibition furthered our understanding of an artist who simultaneously straddles magical, mythical, and scientific realms.

Kher’s intuitive practice brings into play the bodily senses – ‘I hear it, taste it, eat it, write it, draw it’ – as she describes drawing as a means of ‘knowing’; an idea that lay at the heart of this exhibition, encouraging audiences to adopt the artist’s own curiosity in feeling out narratives amidst her drawings and sculpture.

The Body is a Place also featured Kher’s monumental bindi drawings and the installation Links in a chain, which playfully exchanges word and image, in addition to the quiet solitude of her Chimera casts, in which the artist buries ‘the secrets of the soul’ under layers of wax and plaster; and the impossible shapes and forms of her ‘balance’ sculptures. Alongside these sat a new iteration of Virus; a site-specific work conceived in 2010 and executed annually as a 30-year project incorporating her bindi drawings and text, and offering an intimate portal into Kher’s world.

The exhibition took place across Arnolfini’s ground and first floor galleries, and was accompanied by a new publication, a programme of engagement activities, and live events (including film, music and performance), in addition to an exhibition produced by students from our university partner UWE responding to the themes found in Kher’s work.

'Bharti Kher. Ancestor'

Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, New York NY

Curated by Public Art Fund Adjunct Curator, Daniel S. Palmer, PhD.

Bharti Kher (b. 1969, London, England) connects New Delhi and New York City with this nearly 18-foot-tall bronze universal mother figure, her most ambitious artwork to date. Its source is a miniature statue from the artist’s Intermediaries series, assembled by recomposing broken clay figurines. Kher finds these small objects in secondhand markets in India, where she moved in 1992 after being raised and educated in the United Kingdom.

This colossal sculpture reflects Kher’s crosscultural identity and her appreciation for India’s rich material culture. Every meaning-laden detail and distressed surface of the original handcrafted object has been meticulously magnified to reflect the journey of this matriarch’s creation. In contrast to urban statuary that commemorates historic individuals or events, Ancestor enters the public space as an allegorical representation paying homage to both the generations that came before and those to follow. Kher’s temporary monument echoes the spirit of the Statue of Liberty. She is an empowered force fostering a diverse community—a hybrid figure whose symbolic references to multiculturalism and plurality embody the possibility of an interconnected space of belonging and care.

'Uncombed, Unforeseen, Unconstrained'

Venice, Italy

'Sculpture at Firstsite'

Colchester, UK

'Strange Attractors'

New Delhi, India

‘Yes No’

Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka, Bangladesh

'Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South'

Johannesburg, South Africa

'Bharti Kher. A Consummate Joy'

Dublin, Ireland

‘Bharti Kher. The Unexpected Freedom of Chaos'

New York NY

'Tantra. enlightenment to revolution'

London, UK

'Desire: A Revision From The 20th Century To The Digital Age'

Dublin, Ireland

'A Wonderful Anarchy'

Bruton, UK

'Djinns, things, places'

Tokyo, Japan

Regent’s Park, London, UK

The Intermediary family (2018)

Photo by Stephen White, Courtesy of Stephen White/Frieze

'Edge of the Wonderland'

Krabi, Thailand

The Intermediary (2018)

Photo credit Thailand Biennale Official Catalogue Photographers

'Facing India'

Wolfsburg, Germany

Photography Marek Kruszewski

'Like Life. Sculpture, Colour and the Body (1300 - Now)'

New York NY

‘My Monster: The Human-Animal Hybrid’

Melbourne, Australia

'Messengers'

Bloomington IN

'Points de départ, points qui lient'

Montreal, Canada

'Dark Matter (MM)'

Berlin, Germany

Salon Berlin presented Bharti Kher’s first solo exhibition in Germany in 2017. Bharti Kher’s work not only blended different techniques, materials, and media, it also fused the male and the female, animal and human, the sacred and the profane, tradition and technology. Inviting associations with alchemical or magical processes, her art at once conveyed the idea that human identity, too, was always transforming and perpetually under construction. The core of her work, she emphasized, was “the body hybridized, defied, glorified, questioned and often even completely absent."

'Sketchbooks and Diaries'

Boston MA

Bharti Kher, 2013 Artist-in-Residence at the Gardner, was enriched and recharged by spending time thinking and living amongst the Museum’s extraordinary building and art treasures. The focus of this show was a series of drawings and notebooks Kher made during that time. The drawings were very tactile, often provocative, and charged with humor and a capriciousness that was smart and mischievous at the same time. They reflected on gender and motherhood, anatomy, and the physiology of pregnancy. They spoke of empathy and love while investigating the enigmatic paradoxes and ambiguities of what it meant to be human.

'The Laws of Reversed Effort'

Paris, France

"The engagement with balance studies the question of dynamic equilibrium: Kher seems as preoccupied with the equilibrium of physical forces, as psychological. She achieves a “steady state” by a surreal conjunction of elements. Drawn from found objects these works are strange tantalizing conjunctions of disparate forms and things – all held together in a delicate precarious balance."— Gayatri Sinha (from the press note)

'This Breathing House'

London, UK

"Kher pumps blood and life through the building. Her works are not commentaries but run a parallel course to things that already exist. From time to time strange, fascinating, discomfiting, wonderful strata arise when Kher posits works that are in complete accord with the "real" world. Her exhibition is a bit like a drawing on acetate, which is placed over an existing reality, producing a variety of new elements in different areas."— Stephanie Rosenthal (from This Breathing House)

Photography Alex Delfanne

'Matter'

Vancouver, Canada

"A cast might sit in her studio for months or even years, waiting for the right textile, the right bit of ceramic, the right wooden object to complement its form and malleability and transformation Kher seeks in the work."— Rebecca M. Brown (from Bharti Kher: Matter)

Photography Maegan Hill-Carroll

'The Future Is Already Here. It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed'

Sydney, Australia

"... Kher'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."— Jo Higgins (from 20th Biennale of Sydney- The Guide)

Photography Ben Symons

'In Her Own Language'

Perth, Australia

"She blends poetics with the portentous. Her work is life affirming in all its vicissitudes and her language is her own."— Margaret Moore (from Bharti Kher: In Her Own Language)

'Not All Who Wander Are Lost'

Boston MA

Kher’s project reflects on maritime history, highlights her interest in mapping and typography, geodesy and colonization, and references the migration of people in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.  

“An atlas lets you hold the world in your hands,” saysBharti Ker. Not All Who Wander Are Lost is in part a readymade: a 1960s map from The Larousse International Political and Economical Atlas, edited by Jean Chardonnet, which Bharti Kher has appropriated, enlarged and transformed, filling the image with multi-colored bindi dots. The Hindi word Bindi is derived from the Sanskrit Bindu, meaning “a drop” or “a small particle.” Bindis are a forehead decoration worn by women and men in India.  They represent the third eye—a symbol of heightened consciousness—and are a central element in the artist’s work. 

'three decimal points. Of a minute of a second of a degree'

Zurich, Switzerland

"... they form a heterogeneous narrative in which Kher further explores the artistic strategy of stripping objects of their meaning and making them open to misinterpretation and magic, creating alluring works of abstract beauty."

Photography Stefan Altenburger

'Kochi-Muziris Biennale'

Kochi, India

"By both confronting and accepting gravitational forces all objects can find their perfect equilibrium, poise and meaning."— Bharti Kher

Photography Dheeraj Thakur

'Misdemeanours'

Shanghai, China

“In deconstructing Kher's oeuvre, one finds three major interlocking intellectual concerns, including an understanding of the body and its mutation, the role and agency of art, and the abstraction that results from repeated forms and gestures."— Sandhini Poddar (from Misdemeanors)

Photography Yan Tao

'Anomalies'

Seoul, Korea

Featuring works that reference known forms and physical anatomy, the show highlights Kher's ability to imbue her artworks with psychosocial solemnity through the process of transformation.

'Bind the Dream State to your Waking Life'

New Delhi, India

Kher both excavates and destabilizes the inherent meanings found in common objects to arrive at poetic conjunctions that speak of social tensions and personal discoveries.

'Many, (too) many, more than before'

Hong Kong, China

Her chimeras, mythical monsters and allegorical tales combine references that are topical and traditional, political and post-colonial at the same time.

'The hot winds that blow from the West'

New York NY

The artist plays with mythology, cultural and gender stereotypes, and tropes of domesticity to map a route on which viewers may travel between the familiar and the alien, the mundane and the divine, all while remaining in a one place.

'Massive/Intensive. Contemporary Art from India'

Tel Aviv, Israel

'India. Art Now'

Arken, Denmark

London, UK

Known above all for her bold use of colourfully vibrant, ready-made, stick-on vinyl bindis on create spectacular and labour-intensive paintings, Kher introduces us to a new form of the medium and simultaneously challenges our understanding of what a painting can be.

'Paris. Delhi. Bombay'

Paris, France

'Leave your smell'

Paris, France

'Maximum INDIA'

Washington DC

‘inevitable undeniable necessary’

London, UK

In her art, Kher gives form to the slightly strange and slightly awkward encounters with the daily rituals of life. Her vision makes the banal wondrous and the quotidian unusual, sometimes even disturbing. Her use of found objects, such as mirrors or furniture, is informed by her own position as an artist located between geographic and social milieus. Her way of working is exploratory: surveying, looking, collecting, and transforming. By bringing to attention the overlooked world with its everyday acts, such as applying the bindi in Indian culture, confessing as a ritual or looking at oneself in a mirror, and then re-assessing their meaning, Kher’s work repositions the viewer’s relationship with the object.

An arcane symbol of fertility, the contemporary stick-on bindi is a popular cosmetic device available in different shapes and colours and is an integral part of Kher’s œuvre. Exploiting their cultural and aesthetic dualisms, Kher uses bindis as an epidermal filter to transform objects. As shimmering signs in the form of waves, constellations, and spirals, Kher’s bindis mediate between codes and symbols and the ritual marking of time.

In the main gallery will be 'confess', a room whose interior surfaces are animated by oculi-like feminine bindis, providing a boisterous, almost pagan, counterpoint to the hushed rituals of the confessional. The single light bulb hanging from the ceiling brings with it images of forced confessions in prison cells. The claustrophobia of the domestic realm, a persistent theme in Kher’s work, finds parallels in the staged decorum of the church with cupboards that whisper secrets that oscillate between truth and lies. Upstairs, a motorised rocking horse is transformed into a unicorn, its horn marking the arc of time.

In 'contents', a series of medical charts veiled by a diaphanous skin of bindis, Kher plays with the paradoxical nature of the sperm-shaped bindi, at once masculine and feminine, mainstream and esoteric, enduring and ephemeral. Multitudes of these markers provide a psychic filter to the medical charts by drawing our attention to the often painful and unpredictable realities of birthing and the awkwardness of dealing with abnormality both psychologically and genetically.

Kher’s fascination with the interiority of things, from the sanctuary of a private space to cross-sections of a birthing body, brings her unfolding process to the heavily contoured form of a mountain surgically split along a fault line revealing dark, smooth surfaces. Entitled 'inevitable undeniable necessary', the sculpture suggests the impermanence of seemingly immutable objects and the potential of interior rhizomatic space to challenge hierarchic thought.

The artist’s metaphysical explorations are made palpable by 'in the presence of nothing'. A type of standing bell, the singing bowl is used to induce meditation and support chanting in Tantric Buddhism. Replacing the monk, a mechanical rod powered by a visible motor rubs the mallet around the rim of the bowl to produce a continuous 'singing' sound. By placing the bowl in the vault (the gallery is housed in a bank designed by the architect of New Delhi, Edwin Lutyens), Kher initiates a dialogue between metaphysical and material pursuits, absence and presence, while simultaneously marking a specific historical context.

'choleric, phlegmatic, melancholy, sanguine', Kher’s new sculpture to be shown in Southwood Garden, St. James’s Church, bristles with contorted mask-like faces and tentacles, looming with the spectacle of a woman impaled on one of her arms. In a clever inversion of the creation myth which begins with the churning of a sacred mountain by a serpent, Kher offers a quid pro quo of creation and sacrifice. This new work documents a terminal moment, an infernal grotesque form of a Kali goddess who represents the dissolution of an era where all karma and ego end.

'Tokyo Art Meeting. Transformation'

Tokyo, Japan

'choleric, phlegmatic, melancholy, sanguine', Southwood Garden, St. James's Church, London, UK

In a clever inversion of the creation myth which begins with the churning of a sacred mountain by a serpent, Kher offers a quid pro quo of creation and sacrifice.

'Susan Hefuna, Bharti Kher, Fred Tomaselli. Between the Worlds'

Thun, Switzerland

'Virus'

Gateshead, UK

In her first UK solo show, the artist uses the symbol of a tree in her sculpture Solarum Series. The tree appears in the ancient mythologies of many cultures. Kher uses these references, including the mythical warnings of the speaking tree and combines them with contemporary references, such as the recent biological advances of cloning, and rejection personified in the fallen tree. Instead of leaves or fruit, the branches of Solarum Series bear the heads of hundreds of creatures.

Alongside these mystical sculptures is Virus, a series of richly created panels covered with thousands of bindi. The bindi is a spiritual Hindu mark applied to the forehead to represent the third eye. The religious token becomes secular in the densely pattered artworks. Kher uses the symbol to highlight the ordering of human societies, patterns of migration and landscape and the passage of time.

'Sing to them that will listen'

Paris, France

With the wit and irreverence of a prankster and a mad scientist, Kher brings a camp sensibility to her fables which unfold against the backdrop of a technological and ecological dystopia where machines, humans, animals, and nature are out of joint.

'Indian Highway', London, UK (Travelling Exhibition)

All locations:

Astrup Fearnley Museum, 'Indian Highway II', Oslo, Norway (2009)

Herning Kunstmuseum, 'Indian Highway III', Herning, Denmark (2010)

Musée d'Art Contemporain, 'Indian Highway IV', Lyon, France (2011)

MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, 'Indian Highway V', Rome, Italy (2011)

Following the remarkable and rapid economic, social and cultural developments in India, Indian Highway was a timely presentation of the pioneering work being made in the country.

The culmination of extensive research across India, this group exhibition was a snapshot of a vibrant generation of artists working across a range of media. Indian Highway featured artists who had already made a significant impact on the international art world alongside emerging practitioners. The exhibition also included a special project curated by Raqs Media Collective.

Some of the artworks in the exhibition were selected for their connection to the theme of Indian Highway, reflecting the importance of the road in migration and movement and as the link between rural and urban communities. Other works made reference to technology and the ‘information superhighway’, which has been central to India’s economic boom. A common thread throughout was the way in which these artists demonstrate an active political and social engagement, examining complex issues in contemporary India that include environmentalism, religious sectarianism, globalisation, gender, sexuality and class.

To frame and contextualise the work by a younger generation of artists, new paintings were created specially for the Serpentine Gallery by India’s most acclaimed living artist, M. F. Husain. Depicting the history of India, the series was presented on a structure around the exterior of the building, purpose-designed by architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller.

An exhibition conference took place on the 30th January 2009, exploring the theme of the exhibition, reacting to individual works and addressing some of the central theoretical concerns. Above all there was a focus, in the words of Saloni Mathur, on “a concern with the problem of the difference of Indian modernity, with mapping its distinctly colonial and/or postcolonial career and with uncovering the alternatives presented by marginal or subaltern groups to the totalising narratives of a dominant Euro-Western order and its bourgeois beneficiaries in the non-Western world.” Invited speakers included Suman Gopinath, Ranjit Hoskote, Sarat Maharaj, Sharmini Pereira, Kumar Shahani, Raqs Media Collective and Grant Watson.

'Mutant Beauty'

New Delhi, India

'An Absence of Assignable Cause'

New York NY

Kher's work is a highly personal vision of a society maladjusted to the vagaries of market forces and the effects of displacement on one hand and the growing disconnect with the animal world on the other.

'Do not Meddle in the Affairs of Dragons, Because You Are Crunchy and Taste Good with Ketchup'

Mumbai, India