The brutalist concrete hulk of London’s Hayward Gallery, standing solidly on the Southbank abutting Waterloo Bridge, now has a temporary decorative touch. Artists Bharti Kher has covered two concrete façades with large bright circles, breaking the colour and geometry of the postwar gallery.

The work is Target Queen, and the graphic additions are exaggerated bindis,  jewellery or a mark as a symbol used by South Asian women denoting the third eye. A typical bindi is a small dot, worn on forehead between the eyebrows, but here they are blown up to over three metres in diameter projecting a spiritual resonance across the environs, and bringing a feminine energy to the building.

Bindis are devices used by Kher throughout a career that has seen the artist exhibited globally, and though this is the first presentation of her outdoor work in London a similar installation of enlarged bindis was mounted upon the industrial edifice of Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, in 2014. Kher works at various scales and across different mediums, these architectural-scale works only one facet of a diverse and rich mix of sculpture and installation, frequently using found materials in new forms of assemblage.

As found objects, regular sized bindis recur throughout Kher’s work, and can be seen in her current solo exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which Target Queen coincides with. Smashed mirrors have been repaired by the artist before adding a surface of die-cut felt bindis, using the cracks of the glass to form the arrangement. In another location, there is a giant vortex formed of bindis, one of a 30-year project in which Kher creates such an image using bindis, creating one vast swirl of the small dots each year, the number within an outcome of the artist’s age and a diary of significant event that have occurred. Both works are about change and the desire to renew, build again, and create a new constant from flux.


Speaking at the opening of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park exhibition, Kher spoke about her use of mirrors and bindis: “Mirrors allow us to see virtual objects that exist in a virtual world, they are also windows onto this world. On the one hand, we trust what we see. But on the other hand, this is a world that has no physical existence. So, when I make works with the bindi, the building is really the conceptual third eye, it is the eye that sees all, it's your consciousness. The bindi paintings have always been about this idea of perception of being seen, and how you see, so virtual, this idea of the real world and the imaginary world.”

The vortex of bindis in Yorkshire works at two scales, each individual circular marker denoting an event and the larger circle, acting as a kind of spiralling threshold, entrance, or exit. At the Hayward, perhaps each of the oversized bindis is also such a portal, acting as a third eye looking out but also inviting passers-by to enter a new way of looking at the architecture and place – through the building into a spiritual and psychological cosmos.

Waterloo Bridge and the Southbank promenade are used by tens of thousands of people a day, if the Target Queen bindis invite, even momentarily suck some of the wandering eyes into their cosmos, Kher will be happy that they help facilitate a coming together of the building, the viewer, and an unknown third place beyond. “The bindi works are always abstract,” Kher said at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, “they connect to something that is really about your subconscious, your inner body, the things that you can't see, the things that you don't understand.”