The Hong Kong Art Fair, which begins this week, springs Hong Kong as the art paradise in the East. One of the most vital galleries in the art world, Hauser and Wirth make their debut and in their unveiling, they will showcase the
works of Bharti Kher and Subodh Gupta. Kher’s bindis have been a fascinating play on the slightly strange and slightly awkward encounters with the daily rituals of everyday living. Here is a womanly vision that translates the banal wondrous and the quotidian unusual to create works of powerful energies.
In the past, Kher’s use of found objects, such as mirrors or furniture, is informed by her own position as an artist located between geographic and social milieus. She unravels a quaint repository through an act of explorations: Almost as if before the act of creation she spends time surveying, looking, collecting and transforming. She draws attention in many ways to the overlooked world with its everyday acts, such as applying the bindi, a normal everyday act, she confesses the beauty and poignancy of the ritual and then re-assesses its metaphoric meanings and moorings. In her work Maze, in which she has used bindis and painted on board, she repositions the viewer’s relationship with the object. It would be interesting to watch the response of men and women to this brilliant evocation.
The bindi oscillates between an arcane symbol of fertility and the object of cosmetic character — it has become Kher’s signature in her lingua franca. Exploiting its cultural and aesthetic dualisms, it is almost as if 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 her painterly act of animation, you will see the oculi-like feminine bindis, providing a boisterous, almost pagan, counterpoint to the hushed rituals of the confessional. In Maze, the work seems as if veiled by a diaphanous skin of bindis. Interestingly, Kher also 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.
Subodh Gupta’s work, which straddles many tiffins boxed into a frame, will have people stopping in awe and admiration. Gupta’s works have always shown an affinity for the domestic realm. His sculptures and installations often incorporate objects that are commonplace in Indian culture, such as the kitchen utensils seen in this sculptural installation. In addition to these utensils, Gupta has included in this work an object with personal significance — the different vessels of the kitchen along with the tiffin box-the common man’s symbol.
Gupta’s genius lies in casting artistic elements in culturally-loaded materials as brass and steel, multiplying their numbers, and arranging them in a perfect, grid-like pattern in a gallery setting the box. Gupta transforms them from traditional, homely items into something extraordinary and enigmatic, producing an act of displacement that speaks to the cultural, economic and social changes faced by contemporary society.
In a recent interview, Gupta said: “I work with my childhood memories. Today, when I use stainless steel utensils in my work, people say I’m taking advantage of a Bihari scenario. It’s a source of laughter for me. I am making art, not branding India. I make very contemporary artworks. My work emerges from the mundane, from my surroundings.”
Gupta documents the daily life of the bazaars with his realistic rendition of the vessel stall, recasting an ensemble of traditional objects of Indian culture. Familiar to both the rural and urban societies of India, these shining steel containers are a ubiquitous element in the trousseau of newly married women and a staple of many Indian homes.
At the Hong Kong Art Fair, Gupta and Kher are bound to move heads and create headlines. For the Indian contemporary art, Hauser and Wirth will be doing yoeman’s service.