One of the current luminaries of contemporary Indian art, Bharti Kher makes her cyclical return to the exhibiting calendar with an exhibition of works at the Rockbund Art Museum, in central Shanghai.

For her Misdemeanours survey show, Kher’s idiosyncratic body of works are given over to this difficult set of spaces that one onto top of the other make for the elongated museum building that protrudes into the clear Asian sky. Characteristically for Kher her works are predominately made up of dated and damaged furnishings that double up as sculptures, and her vividly versatile coloured bindi pieces. Which can be seen adorning the outside facade of the sand-coloured building, as exhibit Target Queen 2014.

Bharti Kher, Target Queen, 2014, Installation view, ’Misdemeanours’, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2014, Photo: Yan Tao © Bharti Kher, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, MyTemplArt Magazine

Bharti Kher, Target Queen, 2014, Installation view, ’Misdemeanours’, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2014, Photo: Yan Tao © Bharti Kher, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Fashioned as it might be as a coloured coded message for the man on the moon. Between the tidy configurations of sculptural objects, the attempt to capture something of the original spirit of the readymade, and her preoccupation with the bindi motif, Kher has her signature style set in stone. Curatorially works like The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, 2008 elevated onto a metal plate; (unlike a Donald Judd, which it appears to seek to resemble), is a work tormented by prominent windows onto windows, corridors and adjoining rooms lined with coffee coloured chairs.

Barthi Kher, The skin speaks a language not its own, 2006, Fibreglass, bindis, 142 x 456 x 195 cm, Photo: Pablo Bartholomew © Bharti Kher, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Barthi Kher, The skin speaks a language not its own, 2006, Fibreglass, bindis, 142 x 456 x 195 cm, Photo: Pablo Bartholomew © Bharti Kher, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

And time and again the architectonic geography of the museum’s galleries interferes with the display. Again Not all who wonder are lost, 2009-2010, incongruously located within the outer well of the fifth floor, is impossibly mis-located behind pillars, lighting, beams, the complex industry of the skylights, and the overbearing rectangular balustrade that runs the length of the room and back again. Visually more rewarding is Kher’s 2011 work The hot winds that blow from the West, shown previously in New York, and Kher’s seminal work, The Skin speaks a language not its own, 2006, of a fibreglass elephant laid out on the gallery’s fourth floor, rooted to the lower gallery; both of which prove more visually satisfying.

 

Bharti Kher, Misdemeanours, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, January 11 – 30 March 2014

http://www.rockbundartmuseum.org/en/