An illuminating exhibition at MO.CO. gathers over 50 artworks spanning two decades of the artist’s work

Lola Kramer

Sublime and grotesque: Huma Bhabha’s sculptures head to the south of France

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7265/Huma-Bhabha" target="_blank">Huma Bhabha</a> frequently begins her lectures by reciting Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias (1818). This sonnet recounts the tale of a traveler stumbling upon shattered, sunken ruins – a monument to a former king, left to decay in a barren landscape. Shelley’s verses find uncanny resonance within Bhabha’s extensive body of sculptures, photographs, and collages. Although her art is predominantly rooted in form and materiality, her first monographic exhibition at a French institution – which opens at Montpellier’s MO.CO. on November 18 – underscores themes of war, fallen civilizations, and the humility necessary to overcome tragic events, subjects that are as much about the past as they are about the present. What Shelley’s poem succinctly represents, and what MO.CO.’s selection offers, is a chance to observe Bhabha’s dedication to bear witness to the continuance of human struggle, ossified in figures bordering on human and animal.
The Pakistani-American artist has often described herself as an artisan. Though trained in printmaking, she is known for her sculpture using found materials and the recycled ‘junk’ of everyday life to create otherworldly figures that merge abstraction and figuration, monumentality, and entropy. Bhabha’s sculptures are sublime and grotesque. Some appear excavated, disfigured and calloused over as if pulled charred from a fire, dissolving time to usher in unseen realms. In her studio, salvaged tires, reclaimed cork, and Styrofoam blocks are stacked, shaved, and painted. Bhabha wastes nothing, and her economical use of material endlessly feeds back into itself to form new and surprising combinations.

On a bright October afternoon I found myself in Poughkeepsie, a short train ride north of Manhattan, to visit Bhabha ahead of her MO.CO. exhibition. A fly appeared, and disappeared (Une mouche est apparue, et disparut) gathers over 50 works, including cork and polystyrene sculptures, bronzes, drawings, engravings, ink on C-prints, and ceramics spanning over two decades of production. It’s the result of numerous international loans from private collections and galleries, many traveling directly from its partner exhibition, Livin’ Things, at M Leuven in Belgium. 
Bhabha lives with her husband, the American painter <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/24347/Jason-Fox" target="_blank">Jason Fox</a>, and their three dogs in a former firehouse that the pair found about a decade after moving to the neighborhood in 2002. It was around the same time that Bhabha found a side job working for a local taxidermist, where she picked up techniques for her sculptures, collecting bones and skulls that ended up in her work.

Visitors walking down the narrow driveway to the entrance patio garden must pass by Constantium (2014), a larger-than-life bronze figure rendered in a gritty asphalt-like texture whose ribs evoke the bars of a cell. Under a cloudless sky, she casts a long shadow. I imagine a little spider might drop into one of her crevices for refuge from the sun. Constantium stands as the guardian of Bhabha’s domain, striking not only for her unblinking yellow eyes or her crudely pronounced breasts but also for another disturbing detail: a chain that simultaneously adorns her and tethers her to her base. Like much of Bhabha’s art, Constantium is terrifying and magnificent, because she is unknowable.&nbsp; 
Born in Karachi in 1962, Bhabha complains that her work is too often only seen through the lens of her biography. ‘The work is not about keeping a tradition of an art from my region,’ she says. To fully engage with Bhabha’s art is to understand that its wisdom comes from a sense of universalism, that it is a crucible of materials, ongoing events, and the significance of monuments both ancient and modern. ‘I’m just a regular person,’ she says. ‘I happen to be from a different place. I wish I came from a real tribe, but no, I’m a mutt. Even though I’m of Indian origin, technically, my parents are from different parts of India,’ she continues. ‘In India and Pakistan, to be really “pure” you have to come from the same place.’ Bhabha’s sculptural sensibility follows that same mongrel philosophy. Her references range from the Atlas figures at the Temple of Jupiter in Agrigento to Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’, Tarkovsky sci-fi landscapes – and even the skid marks on her street, remnants of a violent car crash. If you look closely at her figures and the plinths they are staged on, the distinction between the two becomes blurred: both a means of permanently defining the space around the work and a subtle homage to <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8477/Constantin-Brancusi" target="_blank">Brancusi</a>, a sculptor celebrated for having married the object with the table it sits on.

Bhabha gained widespread critical acclaim in 2018, when she was tapped to make We Come in Peace, a monumental Roof Garden Commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York – a moment when the museum’s architecture became an enormous base for the work. Yet despite her increasing popularity, she has stuck to her humble lifestyle in Poughkeepsie. Bhabha’s modesty and steady work ethic remain defining qualities. The title of her exhibition at MO.CO. is drawn from a poem by the Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet Omar Khayyam, another recurring reference for the artist: 
There was a water-drop, it joined the sea, A speck of dust, it was fused with earth; what of your entering and leaving this world? A fly appeared, and disappeared. 
‘The time you have is short and transient compared to the whole universe,’ Bhabha tells me. She has chosen to spend hers responding to barbaric realities with an awareness transmitted into material production. Throughout the exhibition, Bhabha’s adoption of a tragic sensibility in spite of atrocity holds center stage. Some of the artworks on view reflect the disturbing horrors of war and a preoccupation with seeing life as it really is: tenuous. Bourne Darkly
(2008) is a haunting, upright, childlike figure with an architecturally innovative armature. The idea came from seeing ‘a photo taken in Giacometti’s studio which shows a half figure that had been knocked around’ and had fractured. ‘I was inspired by the frailty of that little figure,’ Bhabha says. She goes on to explain that she used a lamp someone gave her as a base to raise the sculpture into its weightless verticality, an unexpected combination of inert material charged with resilience.

As the floor lamp had given life to Bourne Darkly, other artworks at MO.CO. have also resulted from her will to bring new and unusual materials into her compositions. Throughout the exhibition are photographs of a prostrate, praying figure shrouded in a black garbage bag, a totemic figure carved from blocks of cork that she found in the back of a greeting card store’s liquidation sale, and a rubber tire that she first saw on the side of a road. In her ominous wall-based assemblage The Past is a Foreign Country
(2019) the tire is reworked, flayed and fibrous – in her own words, ‘like flesh blown apart’ – and nearly unrecognizable. 
Bhabha’s sculptures are unnerving from just about every angle. Rising (2016), another piece in the exhibition, is a human-scaled mixed-media sculpture with the peculiar resonance of a flesh-eaten inhumation burial. Presented at a 45-degree angle, the plinth and figure give the impression of reanimation. Rising would have been a wall-based work had the artist not realized how evocative and lifelike it appeared leaning against her studio table. Accidents like these have led to other sculptural achievements suggesting simultaneity and motion. ‘A lot of the work comes from making mistakes,’ and finding out ‘how to solve that mistake,’ she muses. ‘You can make a complete mess of it, but sometimes you can retrieve it. Along the way, hopefully, it gets better.’

The abstracted figures emerging in sculptures like Call at Will (2009) or A Thousand Faces (2021) evoke the body’s malleability through the plastic qualities of clay. They call to mind burned and cosmetically repaired war victims, their facial features disintegrating in the pressings and moldings made by her hands. The distinction between one feature and another dissolves. To walk around work like Shadow Gang (2021), a white monochromatic bust, is to gain new information at every turn. Works like these, along with her expressive photocollage portraits made using wildlife calendars, capture a transitory and uninhibited state somewhere between human and animal. 
There is a patient, watchful aspect to Bhabha’s figures. Like the vivid image conveyed in Shelley’s Ozymandias, her artwork appears to recognize the fallibility of power and to accept that the line between good and evil, civilization and barbarism, is thin. Kingdoms may come and go, the work suggests, but the way we connect with our common humanity, and the infinite dignity of each soul, is to bear witness. What is conveyed most clearly across the artworks included in A fly appeared, and disappeared is Bhabha’s intense awareness of a future traveler looking back at the ruins of today, wondering whether more could have been done. 
<hr>
 Huma Bhabha&nbsp;is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1103/David-Zwirner" target="_blank">David Zwirner</a>&nbsp;(New York, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Paris),&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1158/Xavier-Hufkens" target="_blank">Xavier Hufkens</a> (Brussels), and&nbsp;<a href="https://parisplus.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1101/David-Kordansky-Gallery" target="_blank">David Kordansky Gallery</a> (Los Angeles, New York). 
Huma Bhabha ‘A fly appeared, and disappeared’ MO.CO., Montpellier, France From November 18, 2023, to January 28, 2024
Lola Kramer is a writer and curator based in New York.
Published on November 17, 2023.&nbsp;
Caption for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: Artworks by Huma Bhabha.&nbsp;1. Presented by Salon 94&nbsp;in the Unlimited sector of Art Basel in Basel 2019. 2.&nbsp;The Hood Maker (detail),&nbsp;2019.&nbsp;Private collection.&nbsp;Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.

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An illuminating exhibition at MO.CO. gathers over 50 artworks spanning two decades of the artist’s work

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