‘Live Your Smell’ at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris

A series of significant international shows present a mélange of works in diverse mediums, forms and styles with powerful themes by prominent Indian artists, who unveil new contemporary ideas and concepts. For example, Bharti Kher’s new solo, entitled ‘Live Your Smell’, takes place at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris. It’s based on the premise of allegory.

An accompanying note elaborates: “The artist has used quotidian objects: a staircase, chairs, dressing tables, tea sets that are found in the domestic sphere and endows them with a dysfunctional momentum that eventually ends in their ceremonious shattering. Here these objects suggest remnants of prior acts underlining the idea that something is missing; an imprint perhaps that emphasizes the absence of a person. This fragile precariousness of domestic life, in her new works, turn into a microcosm of the world itself where objects, with their innate function and differences leave traces of and explore the ambiguities that exist within us.”

Writer Kanu Agrawal mentions of her art practice: “She creates fantastic fables populated by animals awash in a great primal wave of semen-shaped bindis, pantheons of female human-ape hybrids, and spectral hosts in dainty domestic settings gone awry. With the wit and irreverence of a prankster and a mad scientist, she 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.

Bharti Kher’s hybrid creatures are fabricated from such a dystopian repository. Through her morphed objects and animals, Kher revels in the discomfort and comedy that result from her encounters with metropolitan and small-town India. She chooses to reside in-between. Firstly, she draws on her own dual identity as an Indian with a British background. Secondly, she locates her work in-between a society, entrenched in class divisions and prescribed gender roles, that retains a strong desire to be, but has never been, ‘truly modern’.

For her, morphing is a survival technique. It is a unique system of camouflage and deception engaged to resist old patriarchal regimes and to invent new hybrid worlds and hybrid creations. The artist’s creations poke fun at their own trajectory: rootless, as they traverse their in-between worlds.