Bharti Kher will unveil a monumental new bronze sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum this summer, as part of a new display bringing her work into conversation with the museum’s historic collections.
Opening on 20th July 2026, the presentation brings together four significant sculptures created between 2008 and 2026. Three works will be installed throughout the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Sculpture Galleries, while the new four-metre-high Gaia (2026) will make its public debut in the Exhibition Road Courtyard.
“Art can connect us between continents and cultures and across time. It is a visceral and cognitive language of its own making,”
Kher said.
Living and working between London and New Delhi, Kher has developed a distinctive sculptural language shaped by movement between cultures. Her work draws together mythology, womanhood and cultural identity, combining found objects and cast bodies with materials and visual languages associated with South Asian cultures, including saris and bindis.
At the centre of the display is Gaia, a monumental bronze female warrior carrying a house on her head. Part figure, part dwelling and part Mother Earth goddess, the sculpture explores ideas of shelter, belonging and displacement, suggesting that home is not simply somewhere we inhabit, but something we carry within ourselves.
The work began as a small clay maquette and forms part of Kher’s ongoing Intermediaries series, which emerged from her collection of traditional Golu figurines: small clay sculptures displayed in homes across South India during festivals. Many arrived at the artist’s New Delhi studio damaged or fragmented, prompting Kher to repair and reassemble them into new hybrid beings.
In Gaia, those ideas are expanded to civic scale. The female warrior embodies both protection and vulnerability, becoming a repository for memory, history and collective experience.
Inside the museum, Ghost (2024) and Animus Mundi (2018) will enter into direct conversation with the V&A’s historic sculpture collections.
Both works are cast from 1970s plaster mannequins collected by Kher in India and connect to the artist’s long fascination with saris, which can be traced back to her childhood in London. Her mother owned a textile and sari shop in Streatham, where Kher helped dress mannequins and developed an early awareness of the garment as a cultural signifier.
In Ghost, a sari coated in resin becomes a translucent, spectral presence, echoing the drapery of classical marble sculpture while exploring mortality, memory and the histories that remain unseen.
As Kher has observed:
“Saris hold the stories of our lives; the single piece of fabric that you wear through life finally becomes your shroud.”
Animus Mundi, meanwhile, combines a female body with a buffalo head covered in bindis and threaded with a flowing blood-red sari. Its title draws on the ancient idea of the “world soul”, a universal force connecting all living things.
The sculpture also engages directly with the history of European art. Its armless body recalls the Venus de Milo, while its drapery references sculptural traditions associated with artists including Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Human and animal, physical and spiritual, the work expands familiar histories of sculpture through Kher’s own hybrid visual language.
Further into the galleries, Warrior with Cloak and Shield (2008) presents another vision of feminine power. Cast from a life model, the figure stands in high heels carrying a shield made from an oversized banana leaf, while a simple shirt suspended from vast antlers becomes an improbable cloak.
Both vulnerable and defiant, the figure belongs to a group of characters Kher has described as
“mythical urban goddesses, creatures who came out of the contradictions of femininity and the idea of womanhood.”
Whitney Kerr-Lewis, Curator, Sculpture 1800–now at the V&A, said:
“We are delighted to bring Bharti Kher’s work to V&A South Kensington, placing it in dialogue with our historic collections. Reflecting on themes of mythology, transformation, belonging and displacement, Kher’s works invite visitors to make unexpected connections, offering new ways of exploring both contemporary sculpture and the objects and histories that shape the museum.”
Together, the four works span almost two decades of Kher’s practice, using hybrid bodies, mythological figures and transformed materials to open new conversations with the V&A’s collections and the histories embedded within them.
Bharti Kher, 20th July 2026, V&A South Kensington
