Artists' Books

This Breathing House ∞ Bharti Kher. by Rebecca Wang

This Breathing House was published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name by British-Indian artist Bharti Kher at the Freud Museum, Sigmund Freud’s final home in London, in 2016. In this book, Chief Curator of Hayward Gallery, UK, Stephanie Rosenthal introduces Kher’s exhibiting artworks throughout the house alongwith the history of the Freud Museum, featuring quotes from the artist herself, as well as Sigmund and Anna Freud, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Didi-Huberman and Maggie Nelson among others.

The front and back cover of This Breathing House is a panorama view of Freud’s study, with Mother (2016) and Father (2016), casts of Kher’s parents, installed in it. Without prior knowledge of the house or the artwork, one can barely tell that the life sized plaster casts were not part of the house. They blend in the ambience of the room seamlessly — Mother sitting next to one end of the original psychoanalytic couch, eyes tightly shut, both hands on her thighs; Father, with the same posture, situated between the desk and the book shelf, but with a large hole through his body at the heart. Both casts are naked, as if they were ready to have their minds read by the renowned founder of psychoanalysis.

Photo Credit: https://www.hauserwirth.com/publications/9460-bharti-kher-this-breathing-house

Kher named the exhibition This Breathing House because she sees the house as a living, breathing organism with a rich history of studying and interpreting the mind and the unconscious. The exhibition is an intimate dialogue with Kher's own subjectivity, memories and psychoanalytic ideas developed by Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna Freud. The one piece that occupies the most space and is visible from the outside of the house day or night is Bloodline (2000). It is a standing thin red cylinder, made of LED lights and traditional Indian women’s bangles, going through the two-story house. Acting like the main artery of the architecture, Bloodline ties in all the exhibiting pieces with the whole house, and invites the viewer to explore and contemplate on the space and the artworks as one entity.

Photo Credit: https://www.hauserwirth.com/publications/9460-bharti-kher-this-breathing-house

The Intermediaries (2016) is a series of clay figurines of part secular and part deity made in the south of India. These peculiar small sculptures are to be taken out and prayed to once a year during festival time. However some of them are damaged from shipping, and Kher sees and displays them as “the broken idols.” According to Freud, the formation of meaning of language and dreams undergoes a “secondary revision” in the unconscious, when forces like social norms, religion and morality repress thoughts and impulses stemming from sexual desire, and find a way to logically integrate the transformed version of such desire into one’s subjectivity through the process of dramatization. Whether The Intermediaries is a representation of the process of “secondary revision,” or religious awareness, the fact that they are damaged and incomplete suggests a more unfiltered mental state, and/or less disguised desire.

Photo Credit: https://www.hauserwirth.com/publications/9460-bharti-kher-this-breathing-house

Next to Anna Freud’s study is Links in a Chain (2016), a series of paper collages made from found children’s book Sally, Dick and Jane. Besides paying tribute to Anna Freud’s remarkable contribution to child psychology, Links in a Chain shares the quality of pictorial scripts or visual puzzles with Surrealist paintings in the 1920s. Automatic drawing was one of the techniques employed by Surrealist artists at the time in hoping the unconscious would slip through during the unrefined process. This series is visibly emotionally charged through the buildups of repetitive shapes and words, blocked out children’s faces and crossed off and altered texts. Kher reveals that the frustrating and frenetic energy here is partly in relation to her own childhood. In a way this series also serves as an interrogation of the patriarchal ideology behind psychoanalysis, and the complete absence of (young) females’ accounts in regard to the Oedipus complex by Sigmund Freud.

Photo Credit: https://www.hauserwirth.com/publications/9460-bharti-kher-this-breathing-house

This Breathing House is Kher’s inquiry into her own subjectivity, memories and unconscious mind in a unique setting that itself becomes part of the work. Through subverting and eradicating the conscious, Kher presents her methodology of tapping into the unconscious in the house once lived the founder of psychoanalysis.

Photo Credit: https://www.hauserwirth.com/publications/9460-bharti-kher-this-breathing-house

Works Cited

Edwards, Steve, and Paul Wood. Art of the Avant-Gardes. Yale University         Press in association with The Open University, 2004.

Foster, Hal, et al. Art Since 1900, vol.2. 3rd ed., Thames & Hudson, 2016.

Freud Museum London. This Breathing House ∞ Bharti Kher. Hauser & Wirth         Publishers, 2016.

Moorcroft, William H. Understanding Sleep and Dreaming. Kluwer Academic/       Plenum Publishers, 2003.

This Breathing House by Bharti Kher; Freud Museum (London, England) Staff (Contribution by)

Call Number: 1896

ISBN: 3952446157

Publication Date: 2017-07-25