Bharti Kher is acclaimed for her masterful approach to assemblage, composing ready-made materials and castings into spellbinding creations. Her process involves breaking apart and reconstituting objects to “know them better,” embracing the impossibility of returning things to what they once were. Light sources and architectural remnants, androgynous body casts, and pillars collide in unusual mise-en-scènes of grand orchestration.

Bones, Kher’s presentation at MOCA, brings together works from the past 15 years with new sculptures, placing distinct series into dialogue. The title, she explains, refers both to bodily remains and to a foundation upon which something can be built.

At MOCA, Kher introduces striking platforms as support structures and navigational tools. Her surreal female figures—some draped in traditional Indian saris, others entwined with spiralling forms—stand or float among abstract elements. Described by her as “shapes with no inside or outside,” Kher’s geometric sculptures, made of wood, stone, and concrete and often secured by ropes and chains, extend and activate one another, sharing a cosmological and physical presence. Throughout her practice, Kher returns to the ways shapes organize systems of belief and perceptions.

Also on view are mirrored Matter paintings, their surfaces densely covered with bindis that sweep into particulate formations, conjuring microscopic life and vast celestial visions. A new monumental tondo, Virus XXVI, gathers on the wall through thousands of bindis, expanding this language into a hypnotic, orbit-like composition.

Bones is a choreography that balances instability with control. Forms tilt, hover, and recalibrate, creating a universe of tension in which opposites coexist and everything is in flux. Transformation is never resolved but continuous—an active, uneasy condition on which all things rest.