“But what does it mean?” the boy asked his mother. “I’m not sure,” his mother replied. “What do you think?”
He scrunched up his nose, working hard to come up with an answer. “Um…Maybe she thinks aliens are coming?” They both considered this.
“Or!” the boy continued “Maybe she created a robot and now the robot wants to destroy the world? Or maybe it’s a statue and the other one is praying to it. Or maybe it’s like, a giant rat and that’s its rat king?”
“All valid,” I said in a loud whisper. Unaware that I was standing behind them, they both looked back at me, clearly terrified. They both moved to an area of the rooftop that was not populated by creepy eavesdroppers.
The artist (right) at the Met
It was a warm and bright Saturday and I had come to the Metropolitan Museum to see Huma Bhabha’s summer commission. Every year the Met commissions an artist to make something specifically for their rooftop garden, which remains on display for the duration of the summer. It is a major commission and the second time in six years that a Pakistani artist was asked to do it (the first was Imran Qureshi in 2013).
Many of you may not have heard about Huma Bhabha. She is not part of the usual discourse of contemporary Pakistani art, mainly because she does not live or exhibit there. Born in Karachi, she studied art in America and has been working here for many years, making her sculptures out of ephemeral materials. “Ephemeral materials” is the term the Met used in their write up for her two giant pieces. You and I would call it trash but I don’t mean it as a put-down at all, because she literally works with things associated with being disposable: garbage bags, cork, found pieces of wood etc. As far as I know, she mainly makes sculptures, and the Met commission is essentially two giant…I suppose you would call them figures?
One figural form is standing and looks like a cross between a mangled African sculpture and a robot made of mud. It has many faces, many genders, but only four limbs. Directly in front of it is a figure on the floor, prostrating. You can only make out two hands in the front and a rat-like tail emerging from the back, while the rest is covered entirely in what looks like a giant black polythene trash bag. The piece is called “We come in Peace” (though it looks more like “We’ve been through Hell”) and, as the boy I terrified illustrated, it could mean anything. The first thing my mind went to when I saw the figure on the floor was a burqa (the title of the particular sculpture is ‘benaam’, as in ‘untitled’ / ‘without name’ in Urdu, which is a hysterically clever translation that I want to use again for contemporary art pieces).
As a viewer from Pakistan, I contextualise her art in comparison, but as someone who sees art in New York galleries I can also see how it's part of a completely different visual tradition and dialogue
The kneeling figure with a rat’s tail is something has come up many times before in Bhabha’s work. I didn’t know about her until about a decade ago, when I attended an artist’s talk that she had come to give at my graduate school. She didn’t speak much about Pakistan or its role in her work except to insist that the usual identity politics that artists can fall into didn’t interest her, nor did she want people to see her in that context. “I don’t want to be seen a Muslim female artist” was one of the quotes I wrote down in my notes from the lecture. The thing I found odd about that assertion then – and I do now – is that you make a figure that looks exactly like a woman wearing a burqa kneeling on the floor and you are from Karachi, Pakistan – and you nevertheless insist that you are not trying to make any kind of point. I accept that artists should not be have to be seen in the context of where they are from in order that their work makes sense. Art can and should be universal in that sense. I suppose she is letting the audience make the final (and uncomfortable) decision to interpret the trash bag as a burqa and in that sense the work is layered and insistent.
Her art isn’t beautiful, and indeed fights against the kind of skill-based aesthetic concerns that a lot of artists from Pakistan are preoccupied with. As a viewer from the country, I contextualise her art in comparison, but as someone who sees art in New York galleries I can also see how it’s part of a completely different visual tradition and dialogue.
Did I like it? No, I didn’t. It wasn’t something I wanted to stare at for long. I found that it was pointed and obscure without admitting that it was either. And while I appreciate that it exists, the aesthetic of the grotesque is not something that I like to look at for too long. But I did like that I continued to think about it for hours afterwards, much like the boy.
