Enclosed spaces and zebras

I work in a gallery, literally in a white cube. Sometimes the space feels like a zoo where I am the animal, the changing artworks are viewers and visitors the food. I have no appetite, because the viewers keep changing and interrupting my thoughts. Sometimes they tell me they are better animals and I believe them. They, you see, are not stuck in the cage, They are only visiting.

Being an invigilator can be mind numbing work. It is well suited for thinkers, not so good for those who stew on singular problems. Usually I enjoy the monotonous parts of my job, they relax me. When I worked as a life model I enjoyed staying perfectly still. To hear the steady scratches on heavy paper, the intense concentration and silence that I held by being still. Like having the power to stop time.

As I walk home from work I sometimes notice that I am viewing the world only through my peripheral vision. Is this why animals raised in a zoos rarely do as well in the wild? Do the bars of their cages create a pattern of viewing, sectioning their vision? When the animals have been turned out in to the wild away from these constraints to their vision, are they unable to focus on singulars their vision becoming a singularity of motion that is best detected through the peripheral vision. Are they in essence blind to what is in front of them?

Contrasts are startling. I realised that crossings for pedestrians in Helsinki use exactly the same amount of white as of the dark colours. The space is never negative but balanced, still playing with my optics. Helsinki has a lot of cobblestone streets, the crossings are made in patterns with the cobblestones. They are different to the general design of the cobblestone streets as well as in their colour. This kind of crossing is continental in design. It doesn't surprise me.

Bharti Kher, “Misdemeanors,”
巴尔提·卡尔，《轻罪》

What does surprise me is that after this obstacle course of running thoughts I have found what I was unwittingly searching for in an art e-mail list I belong to called randian-online.com. They are featuring an artist called Bharti Kher, and her current exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai called Misdemeanors. 

The preview is tonight and the show will run from Jan 11, 2014 – Mar 30, 2014. The exhibition is curated by Sandhini Poddar “a Mumbai-based art historian and Adjunct Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, working on special projects in New York and Abu Dhabi.”

I am struck by Kher's work, it is not the first time I have viewed it. The first time was at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts in Gateshead, in 2008 when I still lived in Northern England. I can't recall the work I saw and did not recognise her name. I do, however, feel an affinity a magnetism towards her art – her search of identity.