Hamad Butt: Apprehensions

Hamad Butt: Apprehensions is the first retrospective exhibition of the work of pioneering artist Hamad Butt (1962–1994) organised by IMMA and Whitechapel Gallery, London. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, and raised in London, he was British South Asian, Muslim, and queer. A contemporary of the Young British Artists, critics described him as epitomizing the new “hazardism” in art; his poignant and severe work is emotive yet austere. Before his AIDS-related death in 1994, aged 32, Butt completed and showed four major sculptural installations, which forged new encounters between art and science in the time of AIDS. He also left behind videos, writings, drawings, paintings and plans for new installations; and was a pioneer of intermedia art, sculptural installation, sci-art and queer diasporic art.

Butt belongs to a group of British artists—most famously Derek Jarman (subject of a 2019 IMMA retrospective)—who responded to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Unlike Jarman however, Butt’s art did so in a less activist way, dealing with the subject matter through subtle inferences to sex and death, an approach which arguably connects his work to major international figures like Félix González-Torres, Martin Wong, or General Idea, who similarly used more minimal sculptural vocabularies.

Butt’s most iconic works, Transmission (1990) and the three-part series Familiars (1992), have never been shown together. They have never been shown alongside his paintings and works on paper. None of his works has ever been shown outside the UK. Hamad Butt: Apprehensions is the first retrospective exhibition of Butt’s work and it seeks to correct the ways his work has been overlooked in British and international histories of contemporary art. It brings together Butt’s extant works, including the four major installations and supplementary parts, including the reconstruction of a destroyed work (a cabinet inhabited by live flies); schematic drawings, sketches and written notes from his archive; previously unseen (or rarely shown) paintings, etchings and works on paper; and a videotaped interview with the artist.

Butt’s works imply physical risk or endangerment: in Transmission, the threatening image of a triffid (a literary harbinger of blindness and mass extinction) is safe to view if one dons protective glasses to screen out the harmful ultraviolet light; in Familiars, we encounter chemicals that can heal us (they are disinfectants), but that irritate, burn, blind or kill if unleashed. He summons the fear of injury and contamination as analogies, perhaps, for the threat of disease and contagion (including that of HIV/AIDS), for mortality, or for airborne disasters—of climate emergency or of war as explored in IMMA’s current exhibition Take a Breath. He also invokes the perceived threat of the racial, religious, or national outsider, through references to Christian and Islamic iconology, and to religious, spiritual, or hermetic orders of knowledge, such as the Islamic history of alchemy. His invocations of the end of the world are redolent in our own contaminated present—blighted (still) by pandemics, looming environmental disaster, migrant crises, and terror from the air.

Hamad Butt: Apprehensions is curated by Dominic Johnson, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at Queen Mary University of London, and co-curated by Gilane Tawadros, Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London and Seán Kissane, Curator: Exhibitions, IMMA. The exhibition is organised in cooperation with Jamal Butt.

The accompanying exhibition catalogue is edited by Dominic Johnson and features a comprehensive survey essay (the first of its kind), and new commissioned essays by scholars, curators, conservators and artists including Alice Correia, Seán Kissane, Steve Kurtz, Adrian Rifkin and others. It is the first significant book-length study of the work of Hamad Butt. The catalogue is published by Prestel and supported by Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Price 35 EUR from the IMMA Shop.