India, March 21 -- I saw Bharti Kher's work at the Frieze Art Fair in London last year. One piece that stood out was Drunken Frenzy (2011), an installation that seems like an earthy landscape. Reds and browns cover the large work, and from a distance, they seem like a cohesive whole. It is only on close inspection that a viewer realises that the whole piece is made of thousands of bindis.

Kher uses bindis in many of her works - she meticulously applies them to various surfaces to create intricate patterns. But the dots are more than decoration or allegory. She uses it as a symbol of the third eye, which, in her words, "forges a link between the real and the spiritual / conceptual / other worlds". That landscape in Drunken Frenzy, then, i...