A Clash Of Civilizations: Interview With Huma Bhabha

Huma Bhabha has a knack for commanding a room. Her anthropomorphic sculptures hold a heavy presence, their unwieldy bodies—composites of rudimentary materials including Styrofoam, cork, and wood—are scarred and scorched. Some feature sooty marks, while deep gauges are found in others. Like survivors rising from a dramatic tragedy, their ragged appearance does not evoke fragility, but rather defiance; their monumentalism stirs reverence, not pity. The ghoulish faces of these forms are reflected in Bhabha’s drawings and collages on paper. Submerged in a maelstrom of color or obscured by billows of dark pigment, they seethe with energy. These aspects of her practice as well as photogravure prints of desolate landscapes doctored with whisps of Indian ink are brought together for the artist’s survey at Gateshead’s Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, “Against Time.” 

Enter the galleries and there’s a fury that festers in the air. Given that Bhabha sees her work, in part, as a response to populism as well as to the suffering and marginalization spurred by majoritarian politics, this lingering agitation is understandable, and laced with an air of melancholy. Her sculptures, theatrically staged upon a series of low plinths, appear engaged in a ceremonial rite, which, characteristic of her work, makes the show ripe for narrative interpretation. Are we intruding upon a civilization? What is its modus operandi? During the exhibition’s opening, I spoke to the artist about the relationships she sees between these figures, their creation, and the malleability of time. 

You seem to have an indifference to time’s passage in that you conflate extensive visual histories and traditions across periods. Sculpture Castle of the Daughter (2016), for example, has multiple heads evoking the Hindu god Vishnu and has a fecund form alluding to African fertility gods covered in expressionistic marks by painters like Georg Baselitz or Cy Twombly. This show is also called “Against Time.” Are you engaging with a specific conceptualization of time? 

“Against Time” as a title for the show comes from the title of a 2009 short story by Antonio Tabucchi that I read. A sentence from the story explains very well my process of making art, the discoveries along the way, and why I chose it: “Everything changed perspective, in a flash he felt the euphoria of discovery, a subtle nausea, a mortal melancholy. But also a sense of infinite liberation, as when we finally understand something we’d known all along and didn’t want to know: it wasn’t the already-seen that was swallowing him in a never-lived past, he instead was capturing it in a future yet to be lived."

Sci-fi literature and films are also integrated in your work. Previously you have discussed the importance of writer Philip K. Dick, and how your sculpture Ripley (2011), a cuboid creature made from Styrofoam boxes with sooty markings, is named after the female protagonist in the Alien film series (1979–2014). What do sci-fi and alien invasion narratives provide? 

Escapism, which was initially very inspiring to me artistically, has now turned into a grim reality. For me, science fiction literature and films provide imagery that help me mutate and modernize a lot of my early modernist influences. I don’t think modernists like Giacometti and Picasso were reading science fiction or watching sci-fi movies like Alien and Terminator.

It can also feel as if you have unearthed an unknown civilization, trying to understand its customs. Do you see each figure as part of a bigger whole? 

Yes, they are related almost like family members, functioning like an ever-expanding pack of wolves.

Why wolves? Is there a particular significance?

I find the mythology and cinematic history surrounding the wolf, coyote, and dog very interesting and inspiring. An example is Joseph Beuys and his relationship to the coyote in [his performance] I Like America and America Likes Me (1974).

This family of figures—both sculptural and drawn—are ravaged. They bear scars and look burnt, some are defaced. What does it mean to be both the creator and the iconoclast? Or perhaps this isn’t even iconoclasm!

No, it’s a scarring that is very much from the present. It’s an emotive response through the use of materials that have a strong presence and relationship to each another. I would like to refer to Shanay Jhaveri’s 2018 essay “Acknowledging Pain: Huma Bhabha’s We Come in Peace,” where he discusses this subject of pain and scarring in the work. He writes, “They retain the look of their original materials but will endure, their distressed, afflicted bodies now the common language of pain and suffering, the precariousness of life, but also of survival.”

The piece Shanay refers to, We Come in Peace (2018), is the towering sculptures you created for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Rooftop Garden Commission in New York. Its creation must have been a physically intense process. How does your body relate to these forms?

Sometimes I think of them as self-portraits before anything else, but not in a literal way, because I make the sculptures with my hands and tools with no mediation through any kind of technology or third person. My body is very much connected to, and part of, my forms.

There’s a strong theatricality in your Baltic show: the sculptures are raised, a group is placed on a level plinth, others are in a constellation on a low tiered plinth. Do you think of your sculptures in this way?  

It is a 3D spectacle, a stage for the sculptures as actors. I see installing the work as an opportunity to stage a recreation of imaginary events. Emma Dean the curator had a very clear vision of how to stage this show.

And by that measure, does the scenography have a narrative intent?

An implied narrative intent, which is offered as a challenge to the viewers’ imaginative impulses, to create a narrative.