The Brooklyn Rail

Just about a month ago I was walking through the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, and came upon a pair of legs carved by a Toltec artist. Broken off thigh-high, they fulfilled all the poetic potentialities of Shelley’s “two vast and trunkless legs of stone.” In the uptown iteration of Huma Bhabha’s two-part exhibition Welcome…to the one who came, a pair of legs in cork titled My Ancestor (2023) stands on a pedestal, again easily recognizable as a shorthand for dethroned monumentality and warmed-over hubris. Bhabha refers often to science fiction in her work; the ultimate confrontation between humanity and otherness. But as we know, science fiction is largely a projection of our own fears about ourselves, and in these two exhibitions of graphic works and several choice sculptures, Bhabha plays with the struggle to enter into the minds of our ancestors, as well as the unpleasant acknowledgement of a creepy pseudo-fascism or impulse to domination that seems to inhere in a great deal of archaic art.

A series of cast iron works are particularly arresting in the vulnerability of their surfaces. They have been allowed to rust, giving the pieces a dusty bright red epidermis. Because of this, the two busts, Untamed and The Other Side (both 2024), seem to have a disarming living presence due to their unstable surfaces, their roughly textured alien visages grimacing and leering at us through irregular apertures in the suede-like oxidation. A combination of Duchampian found industrial object and Picasso-esque resourcefulness in crafting a being out of random forms, they happily incorporate art history while performing a disarming foreign-ness. A small supine figure Waddah (2024), also in rusted iron, seems softer, sleeping or just dead, its peg-like impossible limbs (they could never support this creature) again bring us back to legs, trunkless or otherwise, missing parts, and the ravages of history.

Bhabha’s works on paper are more introspective. While the shape of the heads and their configuration is very “little-green-men”—an E.T. aesthetic—the eyes are collaged images of animals. Going along with the artist’s extra-terrestrial conceit, are these animals reflected in the eyes of some baffled interstellar traveler, seeking to understand our world, or the opposite? Or (in a way the same notion) are these creatures, Tlingit or Haida totem-pole-like, formed of accumulations of wild beasts; chimeric entities exposing the wildness and inherent cruelty of the natural world? The drawings serve as a key to the sculptures—they set a baseline reference for the artist’s general opinion of humanity. As broken, disheveled, and sympathetic as the sculptures appear, the living beings that crafted them must live by the Nietzschean laws of the jungle, and not some gentler morality.

Thus one comes to the three monumental-ish works of Welcome…to the one who came. All are in cast bronze, imitating the eroded appearance of the cork My Ancestor. They are human size or larger: Maybe Nothing Maybe Everything and Nothing Falls (both 2024) are two tall and narrow rectangular solids whose details are incised in bas-relief into the sides of the form. Maybe Nothing Maybe Everything has multiple hands and faces and seems to be bewigged like an Egyptian pharaoh. While it isn’t monstrous in size, like Ozymandias or the Toltec figure from Mexico City, it clearly embodies some primal energy. Bhabha has created a sense of lightness in this boxy figure by whittling a thin space between the legs, allowing for a narrow slit of light to pass through when one confronts the being head-on (or from behind). The sculpture Nothing Falls has been decapitated, and its head replaced by a section of elephantine jaw bone. Again, this is a godlike being, whether its jaw represents some apotropaic magic, or the replacement of a human-form head by an animal, as in the drawings. Even Stones Have Eyes (2023) returns to Shelley’s theme of the once-great fallen on hard times—the monstrous figure’s bulk is supported by a rather humble nondescript cylinder, jammed in between the ground and its hip.

Whether portraits of terrestrial beings or representations of supernatural entities, Bhabha’s figures are stolid beacons of control, not equality. Only the small What Should it Be (2024) is less intimidating, though still impassive with hands held at its sides with intense potential energy like a Greek Kore. The little figure is painted pink from the neck down, perhaps to humanize it somewhat, but the face in dark bronze has mottled and inscrutable features, terrifying in the wide spectrum of what it could be. None of the options seem friendly. In all of Bhabha’s faces, there is a sense of the impassive and the abject, embodying Walt Kelly’s immortal words: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”