Transcription of the artist speaking on Reconstructions for the Museum of Modern Art:
Hello. My name is Huma Bhabha. My family lives in Pakistan. So I visit there every year.
Karachi, where I'm from seems to be under constant construction. And there are lots of unfinished foundations, which I realized could work well as plinths for imaginary monumental sculptures.
But the work is just as much influenced by the ruins that are being created every day by war and environmental destruction. I'm interested and saddened in how ruins are being freshly born constantly. The idea of monument and death is the ultimate raw material in art.
I took black and white photographs of the landscape. And, I drew on them with India ink. The combination of the photographic detail and the drawing is then translated into a whole different medium through the process of etching with a very rich, dark, black ink. It's black, but it actually has a lot of different colors which make the black.
I use discarded materials, and I fashion these materials into figures which recall sort of burnt-out images. They look distressed. They have eroded to just leaving a body part. But they also suggest phoenixes rising from ashes of destruction.
Text by Jorge Luis Borges, an excerpt from The Immortal, a short story from his book Labyrinths:
Everything was elucidated for me that day. The troglodytes were the Immortals; the rivulet of sandy water, the River sought by the horseman. As for the city whose renown had spread as far as the Ganges, it was some nine centuries since the Immortals had razed it. With the relics of its ruins they erected, in the same place, the mad city I had traversed: a kind of parody or inversion and also temple of the irrational gods who govern the world and of whom we know nothing, save that they do not resemble man. This establishment was the last symbol to which the Immortals condescended; it marks a stage at which, judging that all undertakings are in vain, they determined to live in thought, in pure speculation. They erected their structure, forgot it and went to dwell in caves. Absorbed in thought, they hardly perceived the physical world.
