In the world of Huma Bhabha, the grotesque does not repel—it mesmerizes. Her creatures do not plead for empathy; they demand your stare. With Distant Star, now installed at David Zwirner Paris and in dialogue with Giacometti at London’s Barbican, Bhabha conjures a crumbling chorus of avatars—half relic, half resurrection—who whisper through cork and rust, clay and smoke, the murmurs of a future already half-erased.

Bhabha doesn’t sculpt bodies. She scars them. Gouged cork becomes charred skin, rubbed clay becomes bruised memory, and rusted cast iron becomes a totem to time’s erosion. These are not monuments—they are monstrosities built with reverence.

Drawing with Debris, Sculpting with Time

To walk through Distant Star is to walk through the fossilized aftershock of a world gone wrong. A central figure—a sentinel cast in iron—stands alone, as if exiled from mythology, haloed in oxidation. It is not a statue in the traditional sense but a wound held upright by gravity.

Bhabha’s process is architectural in ruin: cork is slashed, defaced, and smeared with wet clay—layered like an archaeological site mid-excavation. Chicken wire juts like bone from flesh. Styrofoam imitates shattered armor. There’s no illusion here, only confrontation.

Each sculpture functions like a field recording of entropy. And yet, within their craggy torsos and alien limbs lies a strange tenderness—a mythic familiarity forged through material abjection. Her beings, battered and unnameable, stand with the weight of eternity etched into their frames.

Saints, Streetwear, and the Specter of the Hoodie

Bhabha’s drawings mirror this tension, holding our gaze with an eerie clarity. Hooded figures—reminiscent of both Giotto’s saints and Ferguson’s protestors—stare outward with empty, collaged eyes. Their faces are abstracted, erased, yet somehow intimately known.

She begins with her own photographs, then floods them with ink and collage—hallucinatory overlays of saturated gesture and spectral figuration. The result? Not portraits, but portals. They are avatars of both the sacred and the surveilled.

In Bhabha’s hands, the hoodie becomes both sanctuary and symbol—a monastic cowl and a contemporary shroud. It’s a visual slippage between centuries, between Cimabue’s saints and today’s bodies politic. The drawings do not illustrate; they echo.

Art History Refracted Through the Wreckage

Bhabha’s visual language is one of glorious contamination. Egyptian reliquaries, Gandharan Buddhas, African masks, Greek kouroi—these traditions are not quoted but digested. The spirits of Giacometti, Beuys, and Bourgeois hover not as ghosts, but as conspirators.

There is no clean lineage here, no easy genealogy. Bhabha’s references overlap like palimpsests. Her sculptures don’t stand in museums; they emerge from rubble. As Peter Eleey wrote, they are “instant ruins”—monuments already mid-decay.

The detritus she uses—trash, animal skulls, discarded packaging—is not commentary. It is the medium. Through these materials, Bhabha stages an elegy for a world obsessed with consumption and amnesia.

Between the Alien and the Human

There’s an alien logic to Bhabha’s forms—limbs that don’t quite align, faces that refuse symmetry, torsos that seem to flinch under scrutiny. But they aren’t alien from us; they are alien as us.

You might find it scary or too confrontational, but you’re still attracted to it.

– In her interview with The Guardian, Bhabha made it clear.

This is the emotional magnetism of her work—it repels just enough to compel. Her figures linger in the viewer’s mind like dreams of something ancient and unspeakable.

Critic Jonathan Jones called her “today’s Picasso.” But that’s too small. Bhabha is not Cubism’s daughter—she is the midwife of its collapse and rebirth, ushering in a sculptural language for a world where past, present, and future combust on the same altar.

Distant Star: A Sentinel for the Dispossessed

In the gallery’s front room, Distant Star stands like a planet’s last monument. Rust blooms across its surface, a slow choreography of time against form. It watches, unmoved, as viewers shuffle beneath its gaze—part deity, part detritus.

The work will oxidize forever. That’s the point. It insists on impermanence as meaning. Time is not the enemy here; it is the co-artist.

Paired with Giacometti at the Barbican, Bhabha’s work reads like a counter-liturgy—where Giacometti sought the essential thread of the human form, Bhabha offers its unraveling. Her figures are not searching for truth. They are what’s left when truth is too fragile to hold.

Not an Ending, But an Accumulation

Bhabha’s work cannot be neatly categorized. It is not global or local, not modern or ancient. It refuses. That refusal is its power.

Her sculptures don’t conclude. They accrete, erode, linger. They hum with myth, memory, and the weight of being looked at for too long.

 

Distant Star is not a light that guides. It’s a flare in the wreckage—a warning, a prayer, a monument to what survives when everything else crumbles.