Bharti Kher

Aveek Sen: You don’t like losing control.
Bharti Kher: No, none of us really wants complete loss of control. At least, I don’t choose this in totality. But apparently it is sometimes a very good thing to do, to just experience abandonment. This is very much how I function in my studio, putting everything together, it’s partly about control, and suddenly I am not controlling something, then if I don’t know what’s going to happen, specifically, there is a kind of panic or fear. Fear brings panic, panic wells up. It’s a strange feeling that’s not entirely negative. But abandonment is very different.
You go, Oh, just fuck it! and it’s a faster emotive state. At least, that’s what I think it is.

And if you think of the word ‘abandonment’, it has two meanings. One, to let go, and also to be let go of, to be left alone.
Yes. Then the word also suggests sadness and a feeling of despair or, equally, pure joy. But then there’s the other way of letting go of yourself, which means that all the things that are in your brain you have to let go of, and then everything that you hold on to. It must
be quite wonderful to be able to do that – in a way. How you do it, I have no idea. That’s maybe why I make art.

You’re not an abandonment person, are you?
No, I don’t think so. I hold onto everything, always trying to release something.

But, as an artist, if you finish something and send it off, it is to both finish with and let go, to abandon.
But also there’s the process of allowing things to manifest themselves in their own way. Sometimes, things sit in the studio for months and months, and suddenly I open something and go, Oh! You get the sense that most works tell you what they are, and then I wish to believe that they are, in some way, alive or animate and they are going to speak to me. So I talk to my sculptures, like you may talk to plants, Come on then, who are you, what are you trying to be?

And do they tell you when they are finished with you?
Yeah, I sound like I should be locked up, but they tell you, I’m done. You just know they are going to walk away now.

You told me once that you have notebooks in which you write down phrases.
They are notes, they are working sketches, sometimes they are just explanations of what I am going to make. When I am in a hurry I would scribble: Woman, leg up, yoga position, then later I will make a drawing and talk about who she is. The Messenger [2011], for instance, she was really about being the trickster. That was one word I really liked, the trickster.

Like Mercury, who is also light and cunning and a messenger.
Yes. She is fast, she moves without you seeing, she can slip through the cracks. Also, I had the image in my mind that she was the cloud-walker. I don’t always want to particularly describe the ideas, say, of the bronze warrior or the goddess, even though I think of them all as goddesses. Through all of them you can go to different places I suppose. They are mirages, they arrive and they disappear at will. So, it’s your own way of saying, I want to be here, but I also want to be there, I can do this, but then I can do that too. It’s a fantasy and desire for something that’s larger than the possibilities of the human, which, in turn, is a narrative of the monstrous, the hybrid. These women keep coming into the work because they are larger, they are infinite in spirit in the sense of what they can do, they are mythological, they create awe and wonder and horror.

They are unplaceable, they cannot be located geographically, ethnically, culturally. You can’t place them in Africa or India or the Americas. Is that important to you?
Yes, totally intentional and completely orchestrated. The idea is that you don’t or can’t place them. Why should I do that for you? I was talking to someone this year, trying to explain that I cannot be a sort of anthropological study, so that you can understand the entire subcontinent of India through my work. It’s not possible. You have to understand that because I am a woman artist, and because I am from Asia, it doesn’t mean that my work has then to be a door for you to open and then close. Location and placement … It’s something that is very interesting and also not. I would say, OK, let’s make her nose African and her cheeks or eyes Asian, hair part-Georgian-English and part-tribal and then paint her brown or black. This one is blue, like a girl Krishna, but it hasn’t come out very well, so I might actually paint her a little bit bluer. When I painted that orange across her eyes, I was actually inspired by a Vivienne Westwood show that I was watching on FTV one
night and she, in turn, had probably looked somewhere too. So it’s all over the place. Geography and history – doesn’t everyone have them?

The origins, the sources, the things that nourish you, feed you. We were talking about the books. You mentioned legends, stories, rhymes. But this material, out there, has to dovetail into your search into yourself, all that you reach into. Does that make sense to you?
Yes. I like the idea of the axis, the central axis, where everything turns. For me, it is the physicality of the body. That becomes me – Bharti the body, Bharti the mind – and yes, everything else kind of moves around the studio practice, the way that I think, which, in turn, could be influenced by music, or books. I read very widely and very sporadically, in a very unscholarly way, I hardly finish any book at one go. I start in the middle and I read the last chapter and then I may be through with it. Quite bad, no?

You get from a book what you need for your work and then abandon it. Do you think that, for you, the body is the primary carrier of memory?
Yes. I reference the idea of skin. Many times, actually. What I do with the bindis is create mind maps or skin, in a way, as I use them to mark, scar, or punctuate certain areas or objects. The self, meaning the speaking, touching, feeling, visual body, which is the carrier of the five senses. If there were no body and no mind, then there would be no perception or touch or feel, right? Then art is a kind of amalgamation of all of those senses without a ‘body’. It’s odd, no? Then, the first thing about good art is that it does what it’s not supposed to do. When you see something, you feel it, and then you imagine that you’re looking at something that you can almost taste, smell, hear. But like the snake, to see art and to make art you mustn’t be human … you have to leave the body you know and smell with your tongue, hear with your flesh, taste with your eyes, try to touch what you can’t hear and see with your nose. It’s like when people say you can smell fear – you can! That’s what good art does, na? It’s very instinctive. Instinct is a terribly loose word, which you wish to edit out, and it’s something that I never want to say. But there is something that you know, and you don’t really know what to call it, and it comes from your stomach.

Maybe that’s why animals are important in your work. What do animals know?
Yes. They know many things we still don’t … or I want to believe that is true. I think Kant has written about this idea of man and animals. That animals are purely instinctive, which is why man has such a different way of looking at the world, because there is rationality. I have copied this out in a notebook. I should bring it out and read it to you. I sometimes write these things down.

The Moleskines. If you think of the word, Moleskine, it is a very interesting word. It is a very you-word.
Actually!

There is the animal, the mole, or a mark on the body; and then there is skin, except that there is an ‘e’ after the ‘skin’!
Ah, here it is [the Kant text]. ‘Because of his hankering after freedom, man needs to polish his rudeness. Animals, by contrast, do not, thanks to their instincts. An animal is all it is by virtue of its instinct, and external reason has seen to that. Man, however, needs an inner reason, he has no instinct.’1 I love this idea of ‘polishing our rudeness’. I’m not sure that I agree fully, but it makes me think that maybe all artists are animals! [Laughter] And then there’s the idea that we have some kind of understanding of what we need to be. But as we see them more and more, we do see that monkeys, whales, dolphins, have a very sophisticated social network too. They have migration patterns, and cycles,
which are determined by the body. As women, we are very much determined by our body and its cycle. But we become very sophisticated in our methods … we can change the way of doing what we can do. I think when I wrote this down, I was making the elephant [The skin speaks a language not its own, 2006]. I am really bad, I never date these things in my notebooks. This would be 2008. I had actually finished the elephant by then. I was also thinking about the idea of folly. How then, as human beings, we have something we could call folly. I had always interpreted it as an act of absolute freedom based on nothing but itself. So, is folly then an act of absolute freedom that I am exercising as an artist? Is it freedom of the consciousness, what we were talking about as abandonment? So, is it the wish to seek some kind of abandonment – of image, of feeling – that you kind of wish then to go on a journey, as you do when you hear music or when you need to lose yourself in art in some way? I think if there is an axis, then your own body has to be the core.

I wonder about the history of certain gestures and actions in your practice. When you are carefully reassembling broken pieces of crockery or sticking little bindis on something, what are your hands and fingers remembering, what kind of skills are they calling up?
They are really mimicking the sleight of hand, very important but little actions of the hands. Also, I try to give it meaning. It is my interjection between the material and me and the final product, by touching it, by, I suppose, loving it, caressing it, shaping it. It’s
like you’re making little models of people. It’s like the idea that you make the animal or human and blow life into it and suddenly it’s there. I like that magic.

And if we take these activities further back beyond your art education, what does it go back to, in the memory of your fingers, your body?
I knew I wanted to be an artist since I was very young.

Do you have a theory of why?
Because I liked doing things with my hands. Honestly.

And what would you do as a child, with your hands?
Make things. Like, if I decided that I was going to make a TV today, I would make a box, and then make all the drawings and stick them on string and run it through, and make my TV and say, Everybody come and watch my theatre! I’d knit, I’d crochet a bit. My mum taught me. And I loved my art room at school.

What did your parents do?
My mum’s a really excellent seamstress. So she was always on the machine making clothes and every possible thing she could make when she wasn’t working.

What kind of things would she do?
All our clothes, curtains, coats, sweaters, upholstery things, cutting patterns – the hum of the machine was always there.

Did you ever imitate her?
My sister did, yes. I never really did. My mother taught me how to crochet, to knit, but I sewed later. I can still sew. But I never took it up, I was too lazy, but I can still thread the machine. I was also lucky to have a very good art teacher in school, Martin Shaw. I think
he opened a door to a new world for me when I was very young and I found that world to be magical.

I’m trying to reach that door.
When I was six and joined school, the only reason I got in, I believe, was because I made a ‘beautiful’ drawing of a house with a garden and a road. If someone asks me what’s the favourite drawing that you drew, it’s the house with four windows and the door and a roof
with smoke coming out of it. A little path with a gate [and fence] all the way around, with grass and flowers inside, and the rest of the world is there with you. This drawing of the world is the house with the roof. If there’s no smoke coming from a chimney then it comes
from a fire somewhere else.

A large part of your work now is about what goes on inside that house.
Yes. I have always known that my body and my experiences are quite small, quite contained. And if I venture very far out of it, I find it disconcerting and actually quite confusing, maybe overwhelming, which is why I like to come to the studio every day, I like to be
here a lot of the time. It’s my centre.

So let’s go back to your art teacher in school, and the door he opened.
He opened the door, yes. I think from the age of eight or nine we were life-drawing. The most important thing he taught us was that your work is never finished. Your drawing is never complete. You can just keep going over it. Sometimes he would just come to you and you would show him your favourite drawing, and he would say, ‘All right, start again.’ And you would ask, ‘How?’ And he would show you how you can take white chalk and bring something out of what you have already drawn. How you could bring something out of nothing. (It was metalpoint really.) One of the most important lessons was, ‘Don’t look at the object, look at everything around it. Do you understand what negative space is?’ And you’re nine, and he is talking about ‘negative space’. What did he mean? Then you realise that you’re looking at a table, you have spent your whole life just looking at things, but you have never looked at the space that is not the table to understand
the space that is the table. And when somebody suddenly tells you that, it changes completely the way you look at the world because you start looking at what is not there and what form it takes. I think that is the greatest lesson to learn, that the way you make art is by looking at the things that are not there. That’s what it’s about. To make the things you don’t know, you have to create the things you can’t see.

So the sari, the bindi, they all suggest the body that is not there?
Yes, there’s an absence in a lot of my works. But there is also a sense of something that’s not being said by the person who is not there – that’s why they are so contradictory. And yes, the furniture works, for sure, are about the absence of the body, and I think the bindi works have never gone towards figuration because I like the fact that I can be an abstract artist too. They relate to people, but they are not about people. So you get a sense that this is about the body or the residue of a person, but equally, there’s an absence of
that vehicle.

What about your father? What did he do?
My father is still a textile consultant. So he dealt with fabrics too, but the composition of fabrics, their weight, weaves and knits, fibres and yarns, and then development, production and shipping. My mother used to have a shop where she would sell fabrics, saris, suits and
bangles, among other things.

What was it like inside the shop? Do you have photos?
It smelt of fabric, polyester, dust, sandalwood and window polish. I can still smell it and hear the sound of fabric being torn. She used to have a shop in Park Lane and then Streatham High Street [London]. This was in the late 70s and 80s, when I was quite young.

And would you spend quite a lot of time inside the shop?
Not a huge amount, but I helped out at weekends or whenever we had to go. My kids never want to come to my studio! Have you seen the two naked women just outside my room? When I went to Navin Thomas’s studio in Bangalore, I see them and I’m like, ‘Wow they’re great!’ And he says, ‘Oh, I hate them, please take them.’ – ‘You don’t want them? Are you kidding me?’ They remind me of my childhood because these were the mannequins we, my sister and I, used to dress or just stand next to in the shop window. We’d just be messing around the whole day, playing with fabrics and saris or watching TV. The plaster mannequins would be Indian women like these, with eyeliner and eyeshadow, big seventies hairdos, big boobs, big hips, the fingers of one hand raised like they were about to have tea or something! So dressing them would be part of our play, or changing the window display. Then we’d get totally bored and go ice-skating or walking around the streets – that’s when you can people-watch – and my mum would have to finish what we had left off.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote that painting is much more difficult than sculpture. I’ll tell you what he wrote because I have it in my notebook. He said, ‘Since a sculpture has volume, it cannot convey volume, let alone space and distance, light and shade … These are things that can make painting more real than simply being there. Sculpture has fewer matters to consider and consequently is less demanding of talent than painting.’ I thought that was actually quite brilliant, especially because he says it in the fifteenth century. I think that sculpture is now, in our time, a lot less about light and more about space and density and volume, although painting is still perhaps all the above. The way we look now has changed so significantly. But from this I thought, OK what am I doing? What is it that I am making here? What is it that I’m actually asking you to engage with? When I make these sculptures I am asking you, I think, to engage with form, light, colour, balance, all
very much there. But then there is this kind of other, esoteric other thing, I don’t know, what is this other thing? Is it memory or experience?

Do you feel nostalgic about painting?
Yeah, yeah, hugely nostalgic. I think painting is very tough, there is so little that hasn’t already been made as a two-dimensional image. There’s an inside-physicality in painting. I am making space or not, foreground, background. I like the idea that I can enter a work and engage with it physically from the ‘outside’ in terms of scale as well. It becomes like a person. I think sculpture allows you to do that in another way. I think the shift came because I actually got a bit bored with painting. In sculpture, I touch everything not imagine touching it, I build things, I cut things, I break things. When I cut the top of the head off, I take a mallet and break it and then we make the plaits and we make hair. It’s an engagement with the body.

When you think of your coming to India do you think of it as choice or circumstance?
Choice. I took a coin and tossed it: New York or New Delhi? And it was New Delhi. And circumstances have kept me here.

When you came to India, what was it like for your eye, for your eye’s memory and for your eye’s mind?
I was completely flabbergasted.

Did that stimulate you as a painter, or did that block you?
It blocked me actually. But what’s more specific to how my work changed is that sex was something that defined you as a living being in Delhi. This was something that I hadn’t experienced before, in England. There, my race defined me, in a way, but hardly ever my sex. I realised how conscious I was of the fact that I was a woman. Racism was quite strong in suburban England when I was growing up, and there were places you didn’t go because of that. You realise that all of these things define you in a way that you do not necessarily want to be defined, and maybe that’s why these women I make are not racially defined and are often sexually ambiguous. I actually don’t believe that these things are important.

In terms of how the bindis function, I think I should talk about what they actually mean for me. The density of the work is changing now. There is much more layering, much more this idea that they are like codes or languages that you can’t read. You can’t really
focus on the image, and your eyes are constantly shifting, moving forwards and then back. Then there is the smashing of the mirror surface, the idea of the self as multiple. These are visual tricks that I can push, but what the bindis do is like an action of covering the self. Say, if you carry the skin of another, do you make yourself more entire, more yourself through another? By taking another’s skin or parts, do you enhance your own identity – like a shaman maybe?

For me, much of the bindi work is bewildering in terms of scale. You don’t know if you are looking from very high up or if you are looking very closely and blowing up microscopic pieces of texture or surface or skin.
I’ve been looking at landscapes. I’ve just made one work called monster moon over city woods, 2011–2012. I realise that I’m able to flatten the surface in the way it was done before perspective, as they did in, say, miniature painting. You could be looking at it from the top, and that changes the visual plane. It’s aerial, but suddenly when you bring in the sun or the moon – a sphere – some parts become flat again and others three-dimensional. So you’re looking at plans and elevations almost as you do with buildings. Now I’m thinking of a new body of bindi works as landscapes.

It is also like the flattening one does while making a map.
And then you learn to read it. The more I look at them, the more I think of them as topographical, as things that are moving, like rivers or the winds. So I ask the girls in my studio, when they seem to have got stuck with the work, ‘Does water stop? When blood flows through your body does it stop at the end of your fingers?’ Nowhere is there supposed to be any stoppage. There’s got to be a constant movement, no beginning and no end.

In a way, you’re now growing out of the bindis. I feel the bindis have slowly transformed themselves, as you have been using them, and have lost their identity as bindis and turned into something else.
Totally! That’s why I say they are markers. They carry memory and narrative sleights of hand. In a sense, they are a kind of witness to the day in the life of a person as residue, as a leftover of some experience, however small. I celebrate pattern. I celebrate the aesthetic, the beauty, the visual tricks that they start to play. The uncentredeness, how a simple form can take you a long way into somewhere else and bring you back from it. But I don’t know when all these different planets in my work are going to collide. I feel there’s all this stuff happening out there, and something tells me that I should just let the works happen independently of one another. Yet, they constantly refer to each other. Through the bindi works, I am able to address things that I can’t explore in my sculpture.