Huma Bhabha | Degraded | doppiozero

From a distance it looks like a mannequin, one of those used in costume rides or in some target practice. A human body without doubt, although headless and armless, a life-size simulacrum erected on two crude legs that hint at a step with the stiffness of an Egyptian statue. A body caught in an uncertain, indefinable state: is it the sketch of a figure? Or its final state, an interrupted or failed experiment? There is something vague and threatening about this decapitated sculpture, and strangely expressive, pathetic too. It is both a fetish and a broken toy, a puppet and the burned residue of a curse. It is a grotesque idol hoisted on a poor wooden altar, an indecipherable physiognomy from the “skin” barely held together by a chicken coop net.

With its precarious assembly of wood, clay, metal, polystyrene, pigments, Degraded is a suggestive example of the work of Huma Bhabha, an artist who made the quintessential theme of sculpture – the human body – the epicenter of a research that from the very beginning is inscribed in the general condition of art at the end of modernity: an impure mix of historical forms and contemporary imagery, of cultured, “high” languages, and of utilitarian, “low” references, of refinement and banality, of arduous and sensational.

Born in Pakistan and educated in New York in the frenetic postmodern hybridization climate of the past eighties, Bhabha freely draws in her work from a very wide range of styles and formal echoes. In his sculptures eclectic references to archaic and oriental Greek art, to African and pre-Columbian cultures, as well as a personal reinterpretation of the twentieth-century tradition, from Rodin to Picasso to Giacometti, from De Kooning to Thek and Lüpertz, intertwine and stratify. in an extended arc from expressionist primitivism to mid-twentieth century modernism to postmodernist experiences. This anarchic reinterpretation of artistic memory is therefore further complicated by motifs and images derived from film and television genres – science fiction, horror, for example – and by borrowings from media imagery, political current events, mythologies and collective traumas. .

Original synthesis between cynical pop appropriation, expressionist figurativeness and pungent political attitude, Huma Bhabha’s sculpture thus gives visible form to the contradictory tension that inhabits our contemporaneity. All the more threatening the more archaic and post-apocalyptic at the same time, his figures are often presented in installations that favor a narrative reading and in which explicit references to violence emerge, to the exercise of an Evil removed from any civilization project, as well as to war and colonial domination. Hieratic and at the same time grotesque, his sculptures often appear engaged in “conversations”, almost living picturesin which the viewer is invited to grasp the traces of an allegorical meditation on the surrounding cultural and political scenario.

In this way the human body becomes for Bhabha the crossroads of unresolved tensions, of a constitutive ambivalence which in fact escapes any traditional purely aesthetic distillation. An example of this conception is the imposing We come in peacea 2018 sculpture more than three and a half meters high, in which the face of the sinister anthropomorphic alien of Predatora movie sci-fi from 1987, multiplied three times like that of a Hindu deity, is grafted onto a hermaphrodite body that evokes both expressionist sculpture and motifs of African tribal art. It is a disturbing totem that is charged with specifically political meanings: its title derives from a film shot in 1951 in the middle of the Cold War, The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an extraterrestrial visitor delivers, unheard, a message of peace to the earth. Transported to our age, the alien becomes an infinitely darker and more ambiguous figure, the bearer as it is in the post-2001 world of a message of oppression and domination that the rhetoric of the “just war” and the export of Western democracy no longer succeed. to dissemble.

Even when not so directly attributable to ideological and political themes, Bhabha’s sculpture constantly points to a human condition undermined by historical forces that by perpetuating oppression, division, exploitation, end up abrogating any emancipatory illusion or belief in a common “humanity”. With his body dismembered, burned, residual, Degraded it evokes these effects with peremptory immediacy, showing a stage of human consumption pushed to the limit of final dissolution. Of the proud body of the sculpture, of its implicit challenge to the fragility of matter and the transience of life, only a consumed fragment remains here, a generic simulacrum without identity, without history and without future.