Shanay Jhaveri: So Huma, what were your thoughts when we first invited you to make work for
the roof at The Met?
Huma Bhabha: It was an ideal situation for me to think of the roof being a stage and
the two sculptures are actors or visitors from somewhere else
and they've landed on the roof.
Especially the other day, when it was snowing after we installed the sculptures, the barrenness
of the roof and the color of the sky; it felt like it was a Kurosawa movie.
Shanay Jhaveri: Trudging through the adverse elements to kind of arrive, or to be here.
The title of the installation suggests that it's a first-contact narrative
between humans and aliens.
Huma Bhabha: Yes, the title of the horizontal figure is Benam, which is an Urdu word, the
language spoken in Pakistan, where I'm from.
It means "without name" or "unnamed."
And We Come in Peace is the title of the standing figure, but it's also the title of the installation
so that, you know, one is not afraid.
The fact that they look monstrous and kind of scary is kind of like special effects.
Shanay Jhaveri: The phrase "We come in peace" is derived from science-fiction film.
Huma Bhabha: I've always been interested in the idea of giants walking the earth and I
see these as giants.
Shanay Jhaveri: Monumental sculptures historically have always been used to commemorate a certain
kind of person, and I think you are investigating and questioning some of those received ideas
of who deserves to be monumentalized.
Huma Bhabha: Maybe there is something in these two sculptures which deals with
the relationship between the powerful and the disenfranchised.
One is summoning the other one, or something to that extent.
Shanay Jhaveri: Your work has always had a kind of political exigency
and been responsive to social concerns.
This installation has something quite urgent about it.
They kind of move between these conditions of being strident but
also pained; they're aching but valiant.
Huma Bhabha: I think there is an intention within the work
to sort of make it have a certain inner strength.
Shanay Jhaveri: There is something about the barrenness of nothing else around them
that makes them very compelling.
There is an intimacy to the way that they are located, you know, against this vast skyline.
Huma Bhabha: There's enough going on within the sculptures that they need to have this
much room so that they could breathe.
What I find interesting is that the colors on the standing figure
relate so much to the background buildings.
I guess it's the color of construction materials.
Shanay Jhaveri: And they are construction materials!
Huma Bhabha: And I'm using the same materials: cork, Styrofoam, plastic, wood...
Shanay Jhaveri: Could you walk us through your
process a little bit in actually making the sculptures?
Huma Bhabha: For me it was important to make them to scale, myself, in my studio so that
I could feel their presence.
And then they were transported to the foundry so that we could make them into bronze.
Because of the scale of the works, these have approximately forty molds.
The bronze is poured into the mold.
Then everything is assembled back together and it's welded, so it's a very long process.
They have to figure out, you know, how are we going to translate the plastic to make
it look like it's real.
Shanay Jhaveri: I mean, it bears a remarkable likeness to the actual material.
Huma Bhabha: Exactly, yeah.
I mean, even now, you said this morning, people thought that they had to remove the plastic.
And even with the standing figure, it looks exactly like cork and Styrofoam,
and all the marks are visible.
You can sense ranges of emotion while I was making them.
Shanay Jhaveri: You take these ephemeral materials and now they're bestowed with a sense of permanence.
Those marks of pain or suffering now will endure and become these kind of monuments
to the precariousness of living.
Huma Bhabha: I'm the kind of artist, I don't want to have a text describing
exactly what is happening.
Rather, let the drama unfold.
Shanay Jhaveri: It allows for a viewer to become the third in this conversation.
Huma Bhabha: For me that would be the biggest compliment—if somebody decides to spend
time with them, to try to understand what is happening between the two of them,
what is their relationship to each other or to what is happening in the world.
Shanay Jhaveri: Thank you, Huma.