Huma BhabhaWe Come In Peace

Huma Bhabha (born 1962, Karachi, Pakistan) has been selected to create a site-specific installation for The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, the sixth in a series of commissions for the outdoor space. Bhabha's work addresses themes of colonialism, war, displacement, and memories of place. Using found materials and the detritus of everyday life, she creates haunting human figures that hover between abstraction and figuration, monumentality and entropy.

“Amidst scenes of danger and collapse, scenes of anxiety and paranoia Huma Bhabha’s installation We Come in Peace has landed on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Comprised of two sculptures, the 12-foot tall, five-headed hermaphrodite We Come in Peace and the 16-foot long prostrate Benaam, carefully oriented towards one another, they are settled in the main quadrant of the Iris B. Cantor Roof, with the New York skyline surrounding them. Bhabha has knowingly choreographed a dramatic mise en scene, and allowed for a gripping narrative to ensue of a foreign visitation - Who are they? What are they? Why are they here?...What Bhabha has proposed quite consistently throughout her practice, but even more emphatically in We Come in Peace by way of her very sizable, very visceral sculptures, is the body as the site of exchange. The physicality of her sculptures go beyond the mere notions of the figurative, suggesting that the body is also directly involved in the political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.” — Shanay Jhaveri, Acknowledging Pain: Huma Bhabha’s We Come in Peace, The Roof Garden Commission: Huma Bhabha, We Come in Peace. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018

The Roof Garden Commission: Huma Bhabha, We Come in Peace will be on view on the Iris and Gerald B. Cantor Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York from April 17-October 28, 2018. The exhibition is curated by Sheena Wagstaff, Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art and Shanay Jhaveri, Assistant Curator of South Asian Art.

Learn more on The Metropolitan Museum of Art's website.