Body politics: Bharti Kher on the nature of transformation

"I have more faith in art than I do in human beings,” Bharti Kher says this towards the end of our conversation. The statement is bleak and also a striking admission for an artist who has over three decades built a practice that moves across painting, sculpture, and installation without settling comfortably into any one category. Her work examines precisely what it means to be human. Her materials often carry histories of their own. The bindi, which she has used since the 1990s, has become one of the most recognisable elements of her practice while the sari brings with it associations of memory, identity, labour, and the lives of South Asian women. Through all of her work, Kher seems to repeatedly return to the ideas of transformation and what it means to inhabit a body. Her work often asks us to look again at things we might otherwise believe we already understand.

At London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, where four of Kher’s works—Animus Mundi, Ghost, Warrior with Cloak and Shield, and Gaia are currently in dialogue with objects from its historic South Asian collections, these questions acquire another layer. The museum itself carries complicated histories of collecting, colonialism, and cultural ownership. Kher, however, is less interested in offering definitive answers than in creating the conditions for questions. “I don’t answer questions, I just ask them,” she tells me. Her works, she suggests, are similarly slippery: they resist fixed identities and easy readings.

During our almost hour-long conversation, the British-Indian artist talks about mythology, womanhood, her enduring love of saris, the freedom she finds in moving between mediums, and why she continues to place her faith in art.

Harper’s Bazaar: Your sculptures are being placed in dialogue with the works at the V&A. Did the venue change how you thought about these pieces? Did you want them to challenge the authority of the museum itself?

Bharti Kher: Yes, I think that’s why I was selected as an artist to be part of this project. Work in isolation, of course, performs differently. But every time you put your work into a historical space, specifically a Neoclassical colonial structure such as the V&A, it changes the conversation. The V&A was built in the 19th century to house collections that included objects brought from India, many of which had been collected by the East India Company. Over 20,000 objects were moved into what became the V&A, and those objects remain an important part of its South Asian collection.

So, the musuem has a very long history, and it has extraordinary artefacts and objects in its collection. But sometimes those histories raise complex questions. I think projects with contemporary art can open up dialogues. For me, that’s a more interesting way of looking at art than thinking of it as a verdict or a clear- cut argument. These are questions that we’re opening up, and I think my work is an opportunity to connect with those questions.

HB: Speaking of histories, museums are reassessing whose history they are telling. With your work, what kind of conversations do you hope to open up inside an institution like the V&A?

BK: That’s a really big question! What kind of conversations do you wish to see in museums? It’s not a question that only the artist is answering or asking. It’s also about viewer engagement and how people enter or come to museums and what you, as an audience, are.

Are you a participant in the museum and its history, or are you just a consumer of it? It depends on how you want to enter the museum. Do you want to ask questions, or do you just want to be told how to think?

I’d hope that my work would make people stop, wonder and think, and have conversations, certainly in those historic galleries.

There are works that have been there for centuries; some of them are from the 15th and 16th centuries. And there’s a specific work of mine that is in conversation with Canova, which is a dream, really.

 

HB: One of your works also presents a female warrior carrying her house on her head. What was the emotional starting point for this work?

BK: I made the work in 2008, so that piece is almost 20 years old now. A lot of the earlier female sculptures cameoutofthepremiseofhybridity,ofembodying strength—the strength of a warrior, partly the force of a goddess, and the contradictions inherent within us all as women, that we can be so many things at the same time.

That multiplicity is really not about opposing narratives. You’re built up of multiple narratives in your life; you’re made up of multiplicities. That’s animated through your energy and the tension that comes out when you perceive and look at sculptures, and when you make sculpture, too.

Something like a warrior is about blending the human with the animal and trying to create another. And not in a way that’s fearful. I’m not telling you to be afraid of the unknown; I’m asking you to look at the potential of the unknown.

 

HB: Talking about home, it is something or somewhere we belong. And as someone who has spent decades living between London and Delhi, has your understanding of belonging changed over time?

BK: Yes, I belong where I am at the moment. Mostly, I just belong to my studio. Gaia certainly is talking about what home is. What is this place that I know as my centre, as my being? How do you occupy this space called home? And what does that mean? Is it conceptual or physical? At the most perfunctory level, it’s about a space or a place—the place that we occupy. That’s where you go into the house, the fence around your house, and it expands into the borders around your country. How we move across the world, that’s one side. But then there’s the metaphysical side of the idea of home, what that means within the self. It’s about the spirit, it’s about the nature of the spirit. And I think that’s where that duality comes into my work.

Although she’s carrying a house on her head, it’s not her burden. The work is not about female endurance and sacrifice. She’s decided that it is an extension of her very being. So she’s carrying memory, ancestry, belonging, and shelter, all of it within her.
She’s not a supporting architecture; she’s generating all these forces within her. So the title was very specific. At first, she could have been many things relating to home or house, but Gaia is the ancient idea of the earth as a living organism. I’m not fixing her in the past; I’m creating something that we continue to inhabit. So this idea of home is something that’s continuous, consistently changing. And she’s not just the earth goddess; she’s talking about how we’re inseparable from the world that sustains us.

This idea of the boundaries that we create between the body, the home, and the landscape are much more porous than we imagine.
HB: In Gaia, you transformed a small clay object into a bronze monument. How does enlarging a very intimate object alter its emotional or even political power?
BK: I don’t think anything is about scale. I think a small work has as much political power and monumentality as an outdoor work. Scale is relative to the image that you’re being presented. Not every small work has the potential to become a large one, and not every large work needs to be large. And so, it’s just that specific piece.

I made many of the intermediaries—hundreds, actually—and only about eight of them deserved that scale, where they would actually work physically with a standing human. These are all things that not every work can transform itself into; it doesn’t necessarily have that power. I like the idea that your body somehow has to walk around an object that is bigger than you. You have to engage with it by looking up into it. I wanted you to look up into her, into the house, when you saw the work, so that you actually see her face from underneath. That’s how I thought about that piece.

 

HB: In your other piece, The Ghost, the sari has appeared almost like a translucent skin holding memory. Has your relationship with the sari changed as you have grown older?

BK: When I first started using them, honestly, I didn’t know that much about the anthropology of different weaves. I knew enough, but not a lot. And now I know much more. I find it fascinating and beautiful and craft-oriented. It’s all about hands and families and small weavers.

My mother had a sari shop and a textile shop. My father was in the textile trade. So I’ve been looking at fabric since I was a kid. And it’s quite nice that I can now use it as a material in my work. In Ghost, that is a specific silk. It’s not tussar silk, and it’s not even a fine silk like that. It’s very shiny. It’s the kind of silk that’s treated and has a slight sheen to it. Those saris have a kind of stiffness, and that stiffness was perfect for this work. It created the transparency that I wanted.

HB: Your practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation, yet sculpture seems to have increasingly become the language for you. What can sculpture say that painting cannot, if there is anything like that?

BK: I would say that the reason and the way I make sculpture is that I can stack meaning onto objects. They carry within them an inherent memory of history that I can build on. And then when I stack something else on top of it, it creates another meaning. And then I stack something else on top of it again, and it creates a fourth meaning and a fifth meaning. It’s just a different language, that’s all.

It’s not that it can do anything that painting can’t. Physicality, of course—you walk around a sculpture, you stand in front of a painting. I will say the medium is not the message; the message is in the work. And whatever it takes to get there, you use whatever means you can. If there’s a thread that runs through everything I make, it’s a belief that transformation is our most fundamental condition, and that nothing is fixed.

Bodies, cultures, materials, and even our memories change. So my work isn’t trying to preserve a moment against time. I’m just participating in the now.

 

HB: In one of your interviews, you described art as a language that connects continents and cultures. At a time when the world feels increasingly divided, what responsibility, if any, does art have?

BK: Art is not changing the world. We are not fixing political problems. We’re not in those spaces. I think as an artist, you go back to your studio and try your best. We’re kind of against nature, against ourselves, against human dignity. We’re against almost everything that you grow up to believe—and it’s being destroyed at every level around us. So, yes, maybe the answer to your question is that I have more faith in art than I do in human beings.

This article originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar India's August-September 2026 print issue.

Image credits: courtesy Peter Kelleher

Also read: When your old life no longer fits: The psychology of personal reinvention

Also read: Calm stacking is a simple way to add serenity to your day