Natural Hauntings: A Return to the Creaturely

“Humans,” art historian Glenn Peers contends, “have slipped into a modern faith in knowingness that thinks it exceeds the scale and complexity of our world…, blind[ing] us to other human possibilities.”¹ The statement embodies the recent artworks of Pakistani multimedia artist Huma Bhabha in her 2024 exhibition entitled, “Welcome…to the one who came.” Primarily a sculptor, Bhabha is known for her totemic figures of detritus whose gnarled bodies hint at struggle and to a world beyond, and carry familiar themes of colonialism, globalization, science-fiction, displacement, ruin, and place. New works, including My Ancestor (2023) along with several Untitled (creaturely portraits from 2022 and 2023), share similar themes with an emphasis on nature. The works not only challenge our way of seeing but ultimately how we see ourselves and the stakes involved in that limited understanding. They query the relations of power between man and nature and ask us to exchange our certainties, in part, with curiosity, wonder, and enchantment: a natural human proclivity. 

Huma Bhabha, My Ancestor, 2023 (photo: David Zwirner)

My Ancestor features two upright nubs of cork with white chalk lines depicting the amputated legs of a hooved animal affixed to a single wooden board, giving the impression that they presumably supported a once powerful anthropomorphized figure. In its ruinous state, however, the sculpture reads as a secular relic. Showcasing its durability, My Ancestor materially carries its history into the present, using its affective rhetoric to inspire reverence and belonging. Symbolically laden, the legs signal the destruction of the hidden yet living natural world, rendering unintelligible My Ancestor’s material composition—cork, chalk, and wood—to highlight the power of images and language, which, at once, give meaning to and conceal the world.

Language, particularly the politics of naming, has positives and negatives. Naming is a form of recognition and sense-making. Negatively, it can constitute a violent act, distribute false identities accepted as natural and erase a subject’s complex history. 

My Ancestor’s material components, while signaling resource extraction and globalization, serve as instructional aids for a new way of knowing. Cork oak trees, or Quercus suber, are indigenous to the Mediterranean region. These trees produce cork valued for numerous industrial applications, most notably the familiar wine stopper. Devoid of its familiar uses, cork’s bare materiality discloses the work’s artistic nature and thingly character, properly casting My Ancestor as a disruptor of habits. Following Bill Brown’s definition, a thing is an “irresolvable enigma” that “hover[s] over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable;” it specifies “a particular subject-object relation” via the “work they perform” in behaving their subjects.² Cork is a dead protective layer that replaces the tree’s epidermis. With the factual evocation of cork as skin, My Ancestor, whose “sensuous presence” defies its supposed inanimate character, inspires us as humans to alter our relationship with the world, enrich our relational capacities, and encourage an intercorporeality with nature that stimulates empathy, responsibility, and generosity.³ If one considers the “body [a] thing among things,” a permeable “dividual” or “quasi-object” deeply “entangled” in a relational world who shares an embodied kinship with “all things and everything,” then My Ancestor presents a point of origin, an oracle with regenerative powers offering renewal.⁴ Quercus suber can produce cork for centuries after multiple harvests. Hence, the Ancestor who emerges from the wood below produces not only an image of human impact but a lesson in how one should approach things. Chalk only furthers this notion. As a writing and educational tool that is “powdery and brittle,” ironically much like language, it plays a supporting role to My Ancestor’s raw charismatic power. 

Along with Bhabha’s other living sculptures, My Ancestor presents nature as a haunting. According to religious scholar David Morgan, “haunting seems to happen where enchantment has been banned and suppressed.” Suppressed needs give rise to ghosts, defined as “nagging forms of memory” who “[object] to their mistreatment” and “refuse to let the past go away.”⁵ Monuments to Confederate generals and colonizers provide an all-too-relevant example. As ghosts who have been animated and granted a voice, their material traces evoke competing colonial memories. While a majority hear hate speech, others hear these inanimate statues enacting their freedom of expression, acknowledging their calls for protection from citizens who commit against them “willful injury.” Nature, too, objects to its mistreatment and demands protection. Its voice comes through in rising sea levels and ever-stronger hurricanes, which has only accelerated the “Rights of Nature” movement. 

Huma Bhabha, Untitled, 2023
(photo: David Zwirner)

Extending the “right to life” concept, in addition to complicating our way of seeing, are Bhabha’s enigmatic, Untitled visages, whose aggressive liminal qualities evoke discomfort and sympathy. One rarely sees a picture in its entirety. A beholder discerns different aspects by alternating between the image and the medium. In these works, canines, gorillas, and humpback whales, among other animals, form pupils and supernatural eye colors; silent cries howl through agape mouths fashioned by dog hair; and a photograph of a brick wall forming the creature’s nose deceptively appears as tree bark from a distance. Viewed as a defense mechanism, the latter’s employment of mimicry marks an attempt to gauge a beholder’s relationship as parasitic or mutualistic before revealing itself. In these portraits, Bhabha toys with the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia to lend nature an ambiguous face. With these creatures’ true nature obscured, they blur the distinctions between culture/nature and human/animal, stressing relatedness and a deeper engagement with the sensible world. 

Huma Bhabha, Untitled, 2022
(photo: David Zwirner)

The medium of collage, a historic form of cultural critique, presents further challenges. Subordinate to the overall composition, pasted photographs signal reality and emphasize the picture’s surface, allowing Bhabha’s subject matter—nature’s destruction—and the reality of climate change to directly confront believers and deniers alike with a sense of immediacy.

The mediums of Bhabha’s works are the message. She highlights the symbolic veil that confines nature’s “resources” to secondary agents unable to tell their (his)stories to return this human-centered privilege to the natural world. Her humanoid yet alien creatures aid her effort by placing us face to face with our culpability, calling attention to our indirect relations to and unconscious consumption of nature. As actors in the world, their agency provokes reflection. If one truly sees these creatures, their once menacing and monstrous demeanor can appear quite sweet, relatable, and innocent. Perhaps, blinded by our “knowingness,” we are the monsters, who, selfish and ignorant, possess a ghoulish greed in our Darwinian “struggle for existence,” thus, committing violence.  

The misinterpreting of an artwork can of course be read as another form of violence, a “roving arbitrariness” as Martin Heidegger names it.⁶ But in attempting to understand one’s environment and things’ mysterious nature, one does justice. If receptive, Bhabha’s convincing works can attune us to nature’s aliveness and direct us toward a “democracy of things,” as Peers and others have argued.⁷ 

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. According to art critic Ben Davis, ecological disaster art no longer “shocks” or provokes action; it is one crisis of many that proves too overwhelming.⁸ The public, as well as governments, have grown tired, resorting to imposing penalties and labeling climate activists “eco-clowns” and “eco-terrorists” no matter how informative and clever their actions. One of Just Stop Oil’s latest at Stonehenge, whose generous dusting of orange corn flour transformed the iconic structure into a series of glowing embers, served to mimic the fire within activists and nature. Fittingly accompanying such passions is the widely accepted interpretation of the megaliths as “ancestors,” who, standing over crematory remains, produce an enduring image of a triumphant Nature.⁹  

While Bhabha’s works are often described as apocalyptic or antitheses of progress, revelatory appears better suited. Built from an assemblage of pasts, her works confront the limitations of language while making present an image that brings the unknown closer to us, gifting beholders a glimpse into a potential future. Let us hope they are not cast as Cassandras. Despite their alien appearance, her creatures are very much of this world; it is their message that appears foreign, strange because we begrudgingly acknowledge that they teeter on the edge of a new way of knowing. Just as anthropogenic evolution has altered animals’ environments, behaviors, and genetic compositions, so too will humans be forced to adjust to sub-optimal habitats. Huma Bhabha’s haunting project urges us to reassess our role within a larger ecosystem, to acknowledge nature’s mute scream, and to see ourselves as “living beings [among others] … not just in the world,” but as Hannah Arendt argued, “of the world.”¹⁰  

Notes:

1. Glenn Peers, Animism, Materiality, and Museums: How Do Byzantine Things Feel? (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021), 1. ↩︎
2. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 4-5, 7, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344258. ↩︎
3. Brown, “Thing Theory,” 5. ↩︎
4. Brown, 5; Peers, Animism, Materiality, and Museums, 1, 14. ↩︎
5. David Morgan, “Enchantment, Disenchantment, Re-Enchantment,” in Re-Enchantment ed. James Elkins and David Morgan (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2011), 5, 9. ↩︎
6. Erwin Panofsky, “On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts” trans. Jaś Elsner and Katharina Lorenz, Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (2012): 477, https://doi.org/10.1086/664547. ↩︎
7. Peers, Animism, Materiality, and Museums, 5, 26. ↩︎
8. Ben Davis, “The Shocks Are Not Shocking,” Spike Art Magazine 79: The Pessimist Issue (Spring 2024): 106-109. ↩︎
9. Oliver J. T. Harris and Rachel J. Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies from old materials,” in Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood and Materiality ed. Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey (United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2018), 62-66. ↩︎
10. Veronica Vasterling, “Arendt’s Post-Dualist Approach to Nature: The Plurality of Animals,” HannahArendt.Net 11 no. 1 (2022): 115, https://doi.org/10.57773/hanet.v11i1.461. ↩︎

Further Reading:

Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Federico Ferrari. Being Nude: The Skin of Images. Translated by Anne E. O’Byrne and Carlie Anglemire. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.