Transformation—both material and metaphysical—lies at the heart of Bharti Kher’s career-long project to deconstruct the details of everyday life and rearrange them into more honest, if brutal truths. Like the literary masters of metamorphosis Ovid and Kafka, she moves between certainty and uncertainty in order to construct parables of contemporary life and of the body. As confident with abstraction (The hot winds that blow from the West [2011] and The deaf room [2001–12]) as she is with embodiments of the female form (Cloud Walker [2013] and Ghost [2024]), Kher sees her work as an attempt to free the object from itself. Breaking open the ready-made and the real, she creates works that have undergone extraordinary mutation, with rupture serving as the reward. Through her explorations, Kher invites us to contemplate the forces that shape our inner worlds as well as the physical realm around us, demonstrating that change, however radical, incredible, or cruel, is inevitable—not just the stuff of myth and mythology, but the essence of life itself.
Rajesh Punj: When I visited “Alchemies,” your current show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, I was surprised by the selection of works. Rather than keeping to signature pieces, you made many less obvious choices, and a relationship between the abstract and the figurative emerged. I was particularly struck by And all the while the benevolent slept (2008), Benazir (2017–21), and The Alchemist (2024), which appear as physical manifestations of the remarkable digital human/animal hybrids that you were making in 2004; for me, they form a kind of key to the show. What was your intention with the exhibition?
Bharti Kher: Being in London but not always living in London, going to YSP several times to learn about its history—and its seriousness and dedication to sculpture—proved crucial. . .
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