Huma Bhabha: LIVIN’ THINGS

Huma Bhabha confronts the relationships between old and new, human and alien, and beauty and decay in her work. Centered on the figure, she creates monumental androgynous sculptures, busts, and drawings, which exude the timelessness of a contemporary ruin. Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, Bhabha has lived and worked in the United States since 1981. The exhibition LIVIN’ THINGS in M Leuven is Bhabha’s first institutional solo show in Belgium and presents a selective overview from her artistic practice of the past 15 years.

Bhabha draws inspiration from various sources spanning the history of art and visual culture. References to Greek and Egyptian antiquities and Modernist sculpture are layered with science fiction, horror films and popular imagery. Laced with allusions to war, migration, colonisation, and ecological fragility, her works testify to a perpetual cycle of growth and collapse. Bhabha’s varied choice of mediums reflects this substantive ambiguity. She utilises everyday materials such as Styrofoam, wood, clay, chicken wire and  cork. Some of her sculptures are cast in bronze, but retain the idiosyncrasy and tactility of the original materials.

Bhabha also makes drawings on paper and photographs she has taken. The hybridized creatures appear like portraits of beloved or feared alien relatives; collaged images of animals, from calendars and other sources, peer out from their hosts’ eyes. Strategically embedding fragments of a photographically rendered world into one created in pigment, Bhabha conjures another kind of hybrid: a vision of sentience that is as ferocious as it is endearing, and as wild as it is contained.

Prior to the opening on June 9, Huma Bhabha will give an artist talk in M and guide you through her work and process.

The exhibition is a collaboration with MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain. They present a Huma Bhabha solo exhibition starting on November 17, 2023. In association with M Leuven, MO.CO. will issue the first French publication (French/English) on Huma Bhabha’s work, to accompany her first French institutional solo exhibition.

Huma Bhabha is presented by Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles and David Zwirner.

Curator: Eva Wittocx