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Lot Essay
Bharti Kher began working with bindis in 1995 after what she has described as a 'supernova' moment of revelation when she came across a woman in India wearing a serpent shaped bindi on her forehead. A powerful representation of an old India now undergoing rapid change and modernisation, this ancient symbol of beauty, marital status and spiritual awareness applied to their foreheads daily by millions of women across the subcontinent, immediately suggested itself as a rich and appropriate tool for her art.
In this piece, the free flowing bindis seem to invoke a sense of migratory flow in which constellations slowly appear and then fade away to create a complex and cosmic-looking matrix on the board. In projecting the bindi on such a brightly articulated and elaborate scale, Kher privileges the questions of identity, gender and race within the globalising environment. She gently subverts the bindis original associations, deconstructing their religious context and creating an abstract work of aesthetic beauty. At the same time she offers the viewer a moment of almost spiritual contemplation and meditative peace.
In this piece, the free flowing bindis seem to invoke a sense of migratory flow in which constellations slowly appear and then fade away to create a complex and cosmic-looking matrix on the board. In projecting the bindi on such a brightly articulated and elaborate scale, Kher privileges the questions of identity, gender and race within the globalising environment. She gently subverts the bindis original associations, deconstructing their religious context and creating an abstract work of aesthetic beauty. At the same time she offers the viewer a moment of almost spiritual contemplation and meditative peace.