DUBLIN.- IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) is presenting the first retrospective exhibition of the work of ground-breaking artist Hamad Butt (1962-1994).
Born in Lahore, Pakistan and raised in London, Butt 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 non-militant way, dealing with the subject matter through subtle inferences to sex and death, an approach which connects his work to major international figures like Felix González-Torres, who similarly used a more minimal sculptural vocabulary.
Butt’s most iconic works, Transmission (1990) and the three-part series Familiars (1992), have never been shown together. 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 visible 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. 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 a retrospective exhibition developed in collaboration between IMMA and Whitechapel Gallery, London. The exhibition restages the Familiars, and Transmission sculpture series, along with paintings, drawings, and archive materials that contextualise his practice. The exhibition is curated by Dominic Johnson, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at Queen Mary University of London, and co-curated with Seán Kissane and Gilane Tawadros. The exhibition is organised in cooperation with Jamal Butt and the Estate of Hamad 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.
Commenting on the exhibition, Annie Fletcher, IMMA Director said; “We are thrilled to work with Whitechapel Art Gallery, Dominic Johnson, and Jamal Butt, to realise this long-overdue retrospective of Hamad Butt. Building on our series of exhibitions that has revisited and revised the art of the 1990s, including The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now and Derek Jarman: Protest!, this exhibition reveals how other, truly significant, histories of the ‘90s and HIV/AIDS, can enrich our understanding of that time, and also provide a more complex and diverse lineage for the art of the present moment.”
