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Bharti Kher’s Multicultural ‘Ancestor’ – Meet her in Central Park in New York

Imagine meeting your saree-clad ancestor in Central Park! And not only is she 18 feet tall but has a cluster of heads in her hand! For a minute I was confused – was this meant to be the Goddess Durga, with the Pujo season as well as Diwali around the corner. But no, her face was too benign to be Durga, and the heads bunched up in her arms were equally benign, not the skulls of evil-doers that the Goddess would have harvested.  All around, every-day Americans were going about their park activities – talking, cycling, jogging and skateboarding.  Not an eyebrow was raised or a question uttered – this huge saree-clad sculpture blended right into the life and times of Central Park, with babies and dogs and fast food vendors.

So I got myself to the billboard to learn more about this newcomer to Central Park. She is the universal mother figure titled Ancestor, created in bronze by artist Bharti Kher. It is said to be her most ambitious work to date – all of 18 foot tall. According to the notes on the billboard, the inspiration is a miniature statue from the artist’s “Intermediaries” series, assembled by recomposing broken clay figurines. Kher finds these small objects in secondhand markets in India, where she moved in 1992 after being raised and educated in the United Kingdom.

This colossal sculpture reflects Kher’s cross-cultural identity and her appreciation for India’s rich material culture. Every meaning-laden detail and distressed surface of the original hand-crafted object has been meticulously magnified to reflect the journey of this matriarch’s creation. In contrast to urban statuary that commemorates historic individuals or events, Ancestor enters the public space as an allegorical representation paying homage to both the generations that came before and those to follow. Kher’s temporary monument echoes the spirit of the Statue of Liberty. She is an empowered force fostering a diverse community – a hybrid figure whose symbolic references to multiculturalism and plurality embody the possibility of an interconnected space of belonging and care.”

The exhibition is curated by Public Art Fund Adjunct Curator, Daniel S. Palmer, PhD

Ancestor is commissioned by Public Art Fund, New York, and is in the collection of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.

So who is Bharti Kher? Born in London in 1969, she has worked across painting, sculpture, and installation for more than two decades, transforming a range of everyday materials from the bindi to furniture, saris and clay figurines, into new states of being and forms that are entirely her own. Led by her personal experience of double displacement, Kher weaves together the daily rituals of everyday life drawn from multiple places with a kind of magical realism and created mythology. Highly attuned to the complexities of class, race, and gender, her artworks are multifaceted and un-fixed. Kher navigates this and her own position as a woman, creator, and artist traversing different geographic, cultural, and social environments.

Her work encompasses an expansive range from figuration to abstraction, spanning the detailed cast bodies of sex workers to the adjacency of precariously balanced geometric and organic shapes and forms. Kher’s engagement with Indian visual and material culture informs both the subject and material of many of her works. Kher has exhibited in museums around the world, including solo exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; DHC/Art, Montreal, Canada; Museum Frieder Burda / Salon Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China; and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom. Her work is held in the collections of Tate, London, United Kingdom; Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland, Australia; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, UAE; and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE; among others. The artist presently lives and works between London and New Delhi.

(Text courtesy – Public Art Fund, New York)