Huma Bhabha by Tess Bilhartz

TB Whether you’re working sculpturally or drawing with photographs, your hand is emphatically present.

HB I’ve always made my work, and that involves my hand. Making everything myself was initially a reaction to appropriation, relational aesthetics, or art where the idea was more important than the final artwork. Obviously, ideas are important, but the priority for me is the final object.

TB When your sculptures are installed together, their presence shifts. In We Come in Peace (2018), for example, the interaction between the figures implied a narrative juncture or a moment witnessed. Installed together in a gallery, the repetition of sculptures feels ritualistic. These are not artifacts assembled in a museum but rather objects organized with intention by their maker.

HB What I would like is a range of narratives to emerge from and around the works. An implied narrative intent is offered as a challenge to the viewers’ imaginative impulses to create their own narrative. I want to choreograph the sculptures in a theatrical setting and create the illusion of a vast landscape with the stage as a landscape and the sculptures as actors. The space and sometimes the scale of the sculptures can be critical to make something spectacular. 

TB What do you like most about horror movies or the sci-fi genre?

HB Science fiction and archaeology are avenues to explore the past and future while allowing me to reflect the present in my work.

TB I’m curious about this connection you’re drawing between science fiction as future and archaeology as past. How do these two things come together to reflect the present?

HB My interest is in form and practicality, and I use disparate, scavenged materials, noticing how the natural and the synthetic can work together and actually look really beautiful next to each other. The process of creating the sculptures and the residue from this process is an object that resonates between the extreme past and the future. I look and digest and then generate imagery that relies on my imagination. Gods from ancient mythologies mixed with futuristic sci-fi characters, aliens, monsters, and the other are common themes, and they allow me to be creative. Hopefully, my intuitive process generates feelings of fate and destiny in the reading of our present state.

TB I recognize those feelings of destiny and fate, and I also sense a kind of irreverence in the way that you use materials, imagine beings, or evoke destiny. This irreverence reminds me of the humor I sometimes find in horror. When horror movies employ humor, it is often by messing with audience expectations or dragging out a well-established trope to the point of absurdity. We are afraid or disturbed, and yet we laugh. In your work, I feel a similar play between absurdity and reverence: the figures loom large and monumental, but I am also hit with the surprise of their protrusions and amputations, their carvings and scarrings, their flashes of sci-fi color.

HB Humor is essential to a complete work. Extreme horror and humor are most successful when they create images or a language that expresses the most unacceptable. The “ruin effect” I use as a tool in my work was originally an accident of process. In my sculptures, I work from the inside out, focusing on the armature or skeleton; I then build up the surface by incorporating found materials, cork, clay, adding paint, or making marks with oil stick.

TB Do you ever consider humor intentionally as you’re making something, or is it something that happens organically through the process you’ve just described?

HB I would say it appears organically as part of my process, and it’s always there in some way depending on what your humor is. There is no irony; it’s difficult and sophisticated to be humorous.

TB How does fear play a role in these pieces? Some of your older work has a real sense of fright, and artists like Francis Bacon come to mind. Much of the recent work I’ve seen continues to engage with fear, but to me it has less of the “fright” quality and instead simmers.

HB My work deals more with horror and the grotesque. But fear and paranoia of being watched is primordial, and it’s interesting that you feel the heat.

TB These figures watch me. They are both like me and unlike me. They conjure the myriad others that exist on another side of cultural and national divides. Do you want an experience with this work to be political or to change a viewer in some kind of way?

HB The history of art is inextricably linked to life and death; I’m interested in funerary sculptures and totemic figures of people and animals. I see myself as part of a link to those ancient traditions. I am drawn to sculpture about death, and there is a lot of it! I am interested in beauty, and my world does not include borders.

TB What do you think it is about sculptures about death or funerary sculptures that is compelling to you?

HB I am interested in the different formal ways that figurative sculpture has existed and evolved: for example, standing erect, sitting, reclining, moving forward, or lying flat like a sarcophagus, as well as the stylization and exaggeration in most ancient monuments and temples which are houses for the dead. I like the idea of a nonreligious artist creating my own funerary or religious icons versus the history of art where artists create work for the state-sanctioned religion of the time. In my own lifetime, endless wars for profit at the expense of millions of lives are speeding up the death of the planet.

TB Within those monuments to death are also almost always suggestions of rebirth or a new life. Are there artworks that you think about and come back to over and over again?

HB Rauschenberg’s Combines. I come from a place where almost nothing is thrown away, so I’ve always been drawn to the cheap and discarded.

Huma Bhabha: Welcome . . . to the one who came is on view at David Zwirner Gallery on East 69th Street in New York City until April 6 and on West 20th Street in New York City until April 13.