We Come in Peace is a sculptural installation created in 2018 by Huma Bhabha, a New York–based Pakistani-American sculptor, originally commissioned for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The original installation consisted of two sculptures, named We Come in Peace and Benaam, which means "nameless" in Urdu, and was first displayed from April to October 2018.
[7] He said that the sculptures created an "ominous but open-ended narrative, inviting visitors to explore their own thematic interpretations: subjugation and supplication, respect, fear, and/or adoration; social upheaval and displacement; gender, power, and 'memories of place.
[6] She suggests that the work invites the observer to consider the sheer strangeness of extraterrestrial or "post-humanity" lifeforms as they would likely be experienced by humankind, but that such encounters may ultimately offer the possibility of a "melding of cultures and aesthetics that might be harmonious rather than imperialist.
"[6] Describing the work as "eerie, other, unnerving, ambiguous, even alarming",[8] Jerry Saltz for Vulture saw the work as a critique of the West: its "vivisected, gouged idol covered in blotchy graffiti could be from any photograph seen daily of the mayhem in the Middle East, just part of the carnage, interventions, and wars [Bhabha] has called a 'systematic demonization and humiliation of the people and their ancient and present Islamic cultures' ... [h]er Met installation is a vivid rebuke of what the West says to all the cultures it invades: We come in peace.