Huma Bhabha
Before The End
30 April 2024 — 9 March 2025
Pier 3 Greenway Terrace, Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York, NY, USA
With the ominous title Before The End, Huma Bhabha (b. Karachi, Pakistan, 1962) sets the stage to evoke mythologies as old as humankind. Conceived for Brooklyn Bridge Park, Bhabha’s four monumental painted and patinated bronzes were cast from carved cork and skull fragments. The mysterious figures recall ancient effigies cut into tombstones, their surfaces evoking centuries of eroded sediment and stone. Yet, unlike a tomb, these four-sided vertical forms stand elevated above the earth, their bones open to the sky.
“Before The End” is a title borrowed from the writings of Vincent of Beauvais (c. 1184 – 1264), whose Medieval imagination sparked with supernatural and apocalyptic visions. Today, the related popular genres of horror and science fiction continue to inspire Bhabha, as does art history from antiquity to the present day. Her rough-hewn figures are ambiguous—are they emerging or trapped within, rising from the depths of the earth or returning to the underworld? Set amidst an expansive landscape where the natural and man-made converge, Bhabha’s sculptures captivate through contradiction, seemingly forged in geological time yet animated with a visceral sense of immediacy.
Huma Bhabha: Before The End is curated by Public Art Fund Executive & Artistic Director Nicholas Baume with support from Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand.
