Huma Bhabha. Sculpture & Eternal Concerns
Since the early 1990s, Huma Bhabha
(b. 1962, Karachi) has developed a distinct visual vocabulary that draws upon a wide variety of sources, including horror movies, science fiction, ancient artifacts, and religious relics. Focusing mostly on the human figure, Bhabha’s sculpture explores what she describes as the “eternal concerns” of humanity: war, colonialism, memories of home. On the occasion of her largest survey to date at the ICA/Boston, the artist discusses her work with curator Eva Respini.
During my first visit to Huma Bhabha’s studio, my senses, particularly sight, touch, and smell, were immediately heightened and enriched. The artist lives and works in the same building, and her workspace occupies the first floor of a repurposed firehouse in the heart of the commercial district of Poughkeepsie, New York, a small city on the Hudson River that lives in the shadow of its oncethriving industrial past. The proximity of Bhabha’s art to her life is essential – in fact, they are intimately intertwined. Her two golden retrievers came and went during my visit, expertly navigating the piles of debris from a carved cork sculpture in progress, as well as the wood, cork, and Styrofoam that would soon be transformed, mingling with the sharp smell of burnt wood and half-smoked cigars. These primary and primal sensory experiences continue to linger, returning whenever I am in the presence of her work.
Equally intriguing was a board with pinned images along one wall, displaying an assortment of pictures of wolves, ancient cultures, pyramids, and the Japanese anime series Dragon Ball Z. This expository showing of the artist’s research method laid bare not only the rawness and immediacy of her chosen materials, but also an intoxicating mix of her references, high and low: from ancient Gandhara, Alberto Giacometti, Greek kouroi, David Cronenberg films, Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brâncu i photographs, comic books, African masks, Jason Bourne movies, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the writing of Arundhati Roy, and Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combines,” to the television series South Park. The mix of Bhabha’s visual mapping process in combination with the rawness and immediacy of her materials was thoroughly fascinating.
Bhabha is an unabashedly unironic artist, and the nature of what she uses to make her sculptures guides much of her decision making. The artist’s hand and a certain primacy of her interactions with materials are central to her work and practice (she rarely has anything fabricated). Unlike more peripatetic twenty-first century artists who operate from laptops, Bhabha works mainly alone in her studio, and an essential facet of her art is touch. She forages her materials from the street, construction sites, and from the peripheries of cities. The impermanence and urban debris found in sprawling metropolises such as New York and Karachi (where Bhabha was born and raised) are touchstones for the artist. With the prevalence of waste in American culture, she gives second life to discarded ash, burlap, clay, wire, and wood.
The figure, the oldest motif in art, represents the other guiding tenet in Bhabha’s work. In all her pieces the figure looms large (literally, since some of her sculptures tower over the observer), and the artist molds, carves and assembles all of her figures by hand. Exhibiting a refreshing and novel take on the figure, Bhabha’s characters (as she calls them) look ravaged, hollowed out, or haunted, and are often intersex, animalistic, and multiethnic. They are hybrids in their making, composed of myriad combinations of her aforementioned range of characteristic organic and manufactured materials. In an era when bodies, knowledge, and our collective sense of self are increasingly under attack, dematerialized and digitized, Bhabha’s reaffirmation and dedication to the body, touch, our senses, and our connection to history seems like a matter of urgent necessity.
EVA RESPINI: Your work is incredible because it draws from so many different sources, from science fiction to art history. In the current ICA/Boston show, we cover your whole career from the 1990s to the present, and in this display, your myriad references are apparent. When you are in the studio making works, do you begin with a particular inspiration or influence?
HUMA BHABHA: I usually have an idea, especially with the sculpture because of practical construction requirements, but there is a lot of room for improvisation during the process of carving, painting and constructing the piece. Sometimes a particular object I have been looking at might be the starting point. I work from one sculpture to the next so it’s an ongoing exploration. The drawings (especially the larger photographic pieces) are much more open-ended.
Your titles are evocative, funny and poignant; they often add a layer of narrative or point to several layers of meaning. Where do you find them?
Books, films, conversations, observations, thoughts... figuring out the titles is another opportunity to be creative, to add a final veil to the work.
You’re best known as a sculptor and you have a unique visual style. But you were not formally trained in sculpture – how did you get here?
I studied printmaking and painting and started using collage, which led to realizing my strong interest in materials. In graduate school I started putting odd fabrics on stretchers and using found objects, and these led to works eventually coming off the wall and onto the floor… the next thing I knew, I was a sculptor.
Cork has become your signature material. In the ICA show, we have a room with quite a few cork sculptures as a kind of finale for the exhibition. How did cork make its way into your work? Why do you like it? What does it do for you?
I stumbled upon it in a stationery store in Poughkeepsie that was closing and gradually selling off its entire inventory, and they had chunks of cork that had been used for displays. I started by making heads and busts. It’s easy to cut and carve and to transform into something different and unique.
Last summer you had the opportunity to work on a monumental scale at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You revisited an earlier sculpture of yours – a prostrate figure encased in a garbage bag. Why did you reinterpret this form? How did it change as the scale and materials changed? We have included this monumental bronze, Benaam [2018], in the ICA. How does it look inside in the contained spaces of the white cube gallery, since thus far you have only shown it outside, on the wide expanse of the Met rooftop?
I had always dreamed of making a large version of the garbage bag figure, and the Met was a perfect chance to do this. The symbolism of the piece still felt urgent and the chance to enlarge it in bronze felt like a natural evolution from the earlier smaller versions, also because it had to be outside, exposed to the harsh natural elements. I think inside on its own Benaam has become more imposing and creates a stronger physical and emotional reaction from the viewer.
You regularly make drawings and collages, which we have represented in the ICA presentation. How do those relate to the sculptures?
There is the obvious connection between the drawings and the mark making I do on many of the sculptures, but there is also a feeling that all of these characters inhabit the same crazy, dark, funny world, whether they are in bronze, pastel, ink on paper, or cork.
I would like to ask one last question on the political aspects of your art. I find politics to be deeply imbedded in your work, from a critique of wasteful material culture, to the effect of war, conflict and man-made disaster on our planet. I know you prefer to keep the readings of your work open. Can you tell us your thoughts on politics in your work, and any political readings people may apply to it?
I don’t ever start my work with some political message to deliver... my process is very intuitive and formal, but if a vague or even clear political statement emerges while making the work I let it be... because it was meant to be. A political statement does not necessarily make a work less interesting or complicated.
Eva Respini is the Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the ICA/Boston.