Huma Bhabha’s materials and forms are largely drawn from the urban residue and historical overlay of the two cities in which she has resided over the course of her life: Karachi and New York. Her sculptures are typically composed of humble, cast-off materials such as recycled packing supplies, tires, cork, and other industrial and consumer refuse, although she occasionally works in bronze. God of Some Things is one of two large-scale bronze sculptures that flanked the entrance to Bhabha’s first solo museum exhibition, at MoMA PS1 in 2012. Highlighting her interests in figuration and direct carving, the patinated bronze was cast from molds made from a hand-chiseled piece of cork. Texturally, the sculpture gives the appearance of lightweight cork, subverting the viewer’s expectation of the heft and permanence of metal.
The columnar figure is ambiguous: female or male, god or human, ancient or modern—all descriptions could be valid. As is typical of Bhabha’s approach, God of Some Things taps a vast repertoire of examples from art history and archaeology. The singed cork of the original carving has the quality of volcanic rock, suggesting that the figure emerged organically from the earth. Morphologically, the sculpture evokes Alberto Giacometti’s lithe bronze figures, representations of the Egyptian deity Thoth as a baboon, the symmetry of nineteenth-century Fang reliquary sculptures, the hybrid qualities of Auguste Rodin’s carvings, and designs for Hollywood sci-fi monsters.
Bhabha’s sculptures have been described as artifacts from the future: they can read as the ruins of an ancient civilization or as predictions of times to come. Attuned to the ways in which our twenty-first-century megacities can resemble “archaeological digs,” and to the breadth of resources that she finds in a sweeping view of historical and geographical art references, Bhabha’s unconventional materials and gestural approach rebuke the heroicizing function of traditional monumental sculpture.
Rita Gonzalez
2019
