Huma Bhabha

Huma Bhabha’s Prime Traveler exemplifies the artist’s engagement with themes of hybridity, ruin, and post-human identity. Bhabha assertively carves out her figures in cork, which are subsequently cast in bronze. Burnished and jagged in their appearance, Bhabha’s sculptures possess an aesthetic akin to stone, yet their patina likens them to enduring relics of the past. Standing upright and monumental, the sculpture’s totemic presence equally recalls ancient statuary — from Egyptian sculpture to the Greek Kouros.

Throughout her practice, Bhabha explores the visual residue of civilizations — real or imagined — layering science fiction, political histories, and art historical references into her work. Her use of unconventional materials and expressionist mark-making speaks to an aesthetic of fragmentation and survival, where the past and future are collapsed into a single sculptural presence.