Huma Bhabha, Baltic Gateshead, review: eerie pictures of a world short on love

Life is a lonely place. In public, our expressions are masked. We shamble around under visors and hoods. Our borders are tightly shut. We’re made to live as if we carried each other’s death sentence, and everyone else were an Other.

This makes the moment propitious for a Huma Bhabha show. In her sculptures, collages and prints, two decades of which are displayed at Baltic Gateshead, she looks at how we lock each other out, on the small scale or the large: displacement, exile, “othering”. To look at Bhabha’s alien figures and spectral drawings is to see a genealogy of paranoia. We made other people lonely before we did it to ourselves.

The 14 sculptures, placed in the centre of the gallery on two sizeable daises, are the focal point of the show. At more than two metres tall, these figures are large, totemic things, abstracted into mystery by little licks of paint and the rudimentary grooves that define, or represent, their limbs. Their shapes are humanoid, but their faces are distorted; you catch the line of a jaw, or socket-like holes, but never an expression you can read.

Others are more science-fictional: they fuse the organic and the geometric in Styrofoam, clay and wood. It’s Rauschenberg’s materials with Giger’s style; Bhabha has a clear love of the Alien films. Untitled (2006), a partial milk-white head, could be the android Ash from the first instalment, or an entombed colonist from the second. Another piece, a tall box with gaping eyes, is titled Ripley (2011). Behind the fa?ade, it’s hollow, which is clever: the heroine, played by Sigourney Weaver, was a vessel into which we poured our fears of cultures that weren’t like us.

But there’s a counter-melody, too: a stifled sadness. Among the best works are the Reconstructions (2007), a series of photogravures made in Pakistan, then overdrawn. Bhabha captured places that were vacant of human life – an abandoned construction site, or a stretch of coast – and sketched hulking figures into them, recumbent like fallen statues, as if to say: absence isn’t visible, and most people are never memorialised. Lately, we’ve heard a lot about statues being monuments to (shaky) greatness, but they’re also monuments to fear: we must preserve “the best of us”, the argument runs, before we’re forgotten too.

In their obliqueness and lack of finish, these works radiate anxiety. A few of them go awry; the photo-drawings in the Untitled series (2009–18) are better when they don’t use colour, and don’t use their ragged, skull-like sketches to frame pictures of animals. (Animals don’t have souls, and the concept of anxiety isn’t one they share.)

But the monochromatic works are searing: images of landscapes seen through mouthless heads. In works like these, for all the eeriness, you see little wisps of hope. From sealed borders to masked streets, alienation is the mood of the day – and yet, Bhabha insists, society won’t grow entirely cold if you make it your job to care.

Until February 21, 2021. Info: baltic.art