Bhabha is known for her otherworldly sculptures made from a wide variety of salvaged materials. For Bleekmen, she combines organic and industrial elements, such as clay and Styrofoam, to sculpt a totemic masklike form. The work reflects the artist’s interest in Egyptian, Central African, and Native American visual languages. Its title comes from Philip K. Dick’s science fiction book Martian Timeslip (1964), whose characters, the Bleekmen, are the colonized, Indigenous peoples of Mars. Read against Dick’s novel—a dystopian allegory of settler colonialism—Bhabha’s Bleekmen is a reminder that statecraft and the violence of nation building undergird our present.
Gallery label from 2024
Bhabha is best known for her composite sculptures made from an array of organic and industrial materials. In Bleekmen Bhabha has altered and arranged found objects in a way that suggests a mask. The artist has also described the work as evoking a kind of derelict building. The sculpture has a ritualistic, perhaps totemic gravitas, but with its rough-hewn, decomposing quality, it seems to resist grandeur. Bleekmen variously conjures African, Egyptian, and Native American art, as well as futuristic aliens. In fact, the title of the work comes from the characters in Martian Timeslip, a 1964 science fiction book by Philip K. Dick, and refers to the indigenous people of Mars.
Gallery label from Contemporary Galleries: 1980-Now, November 17, 2011-February 17, 2014.
