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Huma Bhabha Installation Commissioned For The Metropolitan Museum Of Art’s Roof Garden
By Julee WJ Chung
HUMA BHABHA, whose practice is characterized by the assemblage of found materials into sculptures, will create the sixth site-specific installation in the Roof Garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image from Carrara International Sculpture Biennale video.
Pakistani artist Huma Bhabha has been commissioned to create a site-specific sculptural installation, We Come in Peace, for the 2018 Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The work will be on view from April 17 to October 28.
Born in Karachi in 1962, Huma Bhabha is now based in Poughkeepsie, New York. She is known for her tactile, poetic assemblages created from found materials such as air-dried clay, wire, wood and Styrofoam. Her uncanny sculptures, often figurative, explore themes of war, colonialism, longing and displacement. Her works have been exhibited around the world, in presentations at MoMA PS1 in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland; the seventh Gwangju Biennale in 2008; the 75th Whitney Biennial in New York in 2010; the third edition of Palais de Tokyo’s triennial exhibition, held in Paris in 2012; the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and more.
In 2008, Bhabha received the Emerging Artist Award administered by the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Five years later, the artist became a member of the Berlin Prize Fellows at the American Academy in Berlin, and was bestowed the Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts.
Her rooftop installation at The Met is the sixth edition of the museum’s site-specific outdoor commissions program. Previous selections have included Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi, British sculptor and installation artist Cornelia Parker, Argentinian sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas, American Minimalist and conceptual artist Dan Graham, as well as French multimedia artist Pierre Huyghe.
Julee WJ Chung is the assistant editor of ArtAsiaPacific.
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