Bharti Kher ‘Leave Your Smell’ – in Paris

Bharti Kher: Absence, Dominate, Saturate

Reminding me of Radhika Jha’s novel Smell, the story of a young Indian girl, Leena, in Paris getting to grips with the particularities of French culture, Galerie Perrotin’s stunning villa in Paris now hosts a solo show by one of India’s most inspiring artists, Bharti Kher. Leena has grown up.

In her second show at Perrotin, Ms Kher makes use of domestic objects which, along with the absence of people, leaves you to fill the story using your imagination. This gives you a feeling of unease, and also of extreme beauty and connection to the work once your own understanding has kicked in. The most powerful room for me, has a series of four staircases strewn with saris, telling the story of how a couple met, in An Encounter that Changed their Lives through They Day they Met, hinting at passion and seduction with a sari strewn sensually on the stairs..to how they parted, in The Night She Left where the strewn sari is entwined with an upturned chair. Each staircase  features Ms Kher’s signature spermatoza bindis.

These bindis also feature on a wonky wooden make up table  Make up (as you go along). Ms Kher’s symbolic depictions of the Home Maker highlight domestic chores. Being one half of the super-art couple with Subodh Gupta, it’s maybe too easy to take a lot of her work as autobiographical.

Exterior of Galerie Perrotin, Paris

Tracey Emin- Sex Please we’re British

Love Is What You Want Neon

Tracey Emin is a peculiarly British phenomenon which other nationalities struggle to understand. Her retrospective at the Hayward in London has been critically acclaimed by Brit critics. It’s got every bit of her-  kept ash from the shop  she’d had with Sarah Lucas, which she burnt down, to sketches, notebooks, letters, poems. They are all here. As well as unborn babies and their clothes. The show is a heart-rending appeal for a wider understanding of the artist’s traumas, linked to her childhood and multiple abortions.

The neon room is gorgeous. Powerful messages in a powerful form. The Unmade Bed  is significantly missing, apparantly Saatchi refused to lend it. The assistant curator told me that it’s actually a relief “as it would have just dominated the show and the media”.

Squeezing out non-conformity at Sadie Coles

Meeting the Oracle

It is said that ‘Odd Man Out squishes and squeezes non conformism and free thinking out of its audience’. In a lo-fi, low budget, art school kind of way, this performance has turned the Sadie Coles gallery in the West End of London into a messy playspace with thinly tacked giant photocopied sheets of paper, puppets and many actors in impish and clannish costumes. A rare spectacle, when work in a gallery makes you laugh. A lot.

Visitors enter the space after casting their vote in a ballot box, which is discussed and perhaps scorned at by the large pixie character who greets them. After that, they are directed downstairs where actors rustle giant bin bags to create a treacherous black ocean must be crossed to meet someone in a giant inflatable. The puppet show which follows is eerie to say the least, especially when the actors dress you up like them, in long hooded outfits and you become the puppet master.

Visitors also encounter The Doris Lessing Book Club where they can engage in discussions about the book, The Grass is Singing with a group of actors, all who are paid 10 GBP an hour to be there.

Perhaps most powerful is meeting the Oracle who is brought out as visitors crawl on the floor of the gallery. I was told a secret “that I’ll lose my mobile phone” and that my friend has “invested badly”. Both turn out to be true.

Lali Chetwyn has been accepted by the art world where she’s certainly livening up the scene. And changing the way we interact in galleries. Making them lot more fun.Thank you!

Crossing the treacherous bin bag seas

Free Weiwei – art solidarity, London

This week in London the art scene has been about Ai Wei Wei who was famously last seen here at Turbine Hall, Tate Modern. On Wednesday, Somerset House opened “Circle of Animals, Zodiac Heads”- 12 large bronze statues from the Chinese Zodiac, based on a series which were pillaged by French and British troops from outside Beijing in 1860. They cannot be traced (although Yves Saint Laurent collection is rumoured to have two).

At the Lisson gallery, the gallery attendees held a one minute of silence for Weiwei. Then suddenly, two Chinese performance artists engaged in a fight, leaving soya sauce and ketchup stains on the pavement behind them.

The show is powerfully symbolic, with newly painted Han Dynasty vases, a surveillance camera in marble, marble doors and chairs, coffins made of wood from the Qing Dynasty and even video work. Greg Hilty, Curator and Director, explained that the Lisson is putting on hold the selling of the work in the show as this could just fuel speculation right now.Tastefully done.

Time Out magazine says “show your solidarity by going (to visit these shows)”. Since April 3rd Weiwei has disappeared. Valiantly his young energetic team continue to mount previously agreed exhibitions around the world in his absence.

As Reza Aramesh, a London based artist suggested, maybe he’s just bowing out of his crazy life and is on a quiet island watching TV (like JD Salinger did). We can hope.

Weiwei at Lisson Gallery