Absolute Kher

Bharti Kher is the latest artist to join the iconic ABSOLUT campaign with her bindi installation. She talks to Priyanka Sharma.

Standing tall next to her recent art work, Bharti Kher can’t help but smile at the curious stares the six feet tall installation is getting from the guests. A swirling mass of multi-hued blue bindis and mirrors adorn the distinct form of the ABSOLUT vodka bottle, which seems to glow from a distance. She distances herself from the business of advertising almost immediately by emphasising, “I wouldn’t agree to do this for just about any other campaign.” But then the ABSOLUT artwork is not an advertising campaign for her but “an artist’s campaign”.

Channeling the creative instinct of talented artists through the distinctive form of the bottle is nothing new to the company. The 30-year old advertising campaign has witnessed nearly 800 iconic works and collaborations with renowned artists such as Andy Warhol, Francesco Clemente, Louise Bourgeois, Rosemarie Trockel, Angus Fairhurst and Béatrice Cussol.

Last year, ABSOLUT approached contemporary Indian artist Subodh Gupta, Kher’s husband, thus making him the first Indian artist to be part of the campaign. Gupta’s interpretation of the bottle had been fashioned from steel utensils and other vessels.

Knowing she was “in good company”, Kher did not hesitate in participating in this “spectacular legacy of artists”. While Warhol’s installation ‘ABSOLUT Warhol’is on display at Stockholm’s new liquor museum, ‘Spritmuseum’, Kher’s art work will be showcased in different cities in India before being exhibited at the Indian Art Fair in January 2012 right next to Gupta’s piece.

Unveiling her installation at the Circa 1193 in Delhi on December 1 along with her husband, Kher refuses to reveal much about her technique and the raw materials used. “I don’t reveal the secrets of the trade,” she says with a smile. Aptly titled ‘ABSOLUT Kher’, the installation makes use of the bindi¸ which has always been the central motif in her practice.

“To me, the bindi is symbolic of the third eye, at times implying absolute perfection,” she says. The story goes that Kher had once encountered a woman in a market wearing a serpent-shaped bindi on her forehead. Walking into a departmental store immediately after, she purchased all the serpent bindis she could find and stuck them in her sketchbook.

Since then, bindis have become part Kher’s signature style. Painstakingly placed on the surface one-by-one to form a design, the multi-coloured bindis represent custom, often inflexible, as well as the dynamic ways in which it is produced and consumed today.

Known for her menagerie of resin-cast animals, Kher made headlines last year when her art work ‘The Skin speaks a language not its own’, a sculpture of a slumped, sprawling she-elephant covered with white bindis, was auctioned at Sotheby’s London for a record $1.5 million (Rs 6.9 crore in 2010). The bid made her the country’s top-selling woman artist and even surpassed her husband’s auction record of $1.4 million in the same year.

The sculpture, that took around ten months to be completed, was bought by Kiran Nadar – wife of HCL Technologies Chairman Shiv Nadar – and is on display at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.

Though she spent quite a few years studying in Europe, she was “super happy to return to India, especially Delhi,” she exclaims. “The people here are so vibrant and quintessentially Indian,” she feels.