BSL Tour: Hamad Butt - Whitechapel Gallery

BSL Tour: Hamad Butt

  • Hamad Butt Portrait

    Hamad Butt with early sculpture, Photograph, Digital loan, Courtesy Jamal Butt

Thu 10 Jul, 6:30pm

Monday Closed
Tuesday 11am–6pm
Wednesday 11am–6pm
Thursday 11am–9pm
Friday 11am–6pm
Saturday 11am–6pm
Sunday 11am–6pm

Access Information

Access
BSL Tour: Hamad Butt

Join the Whitechapel Gallery and Rubbena Aurangzeb-Tariq for a BSL-Led tour of Hamad Butt: Apprehensions

Hamad Butt: Apprehensions is the first major survey of Hamad Butt (b. 1962, Lahore, Pakistan; d. 1994, London, UK).

One of the most innovative artists of his generation, Hamad Butt was a pioneer of intermedia art, bringing art into conversation with science, whilst also referencing his Queer and diasporic experiences. He offered a nuanced artistic response to the AIDS crisis in the UK, taking a conceptual rather than activist approach.

Butt’s conceptually and technically ambitious works seamlessly interweave popular culture, science, alchemy, science fiction, and social and cultural concerns, as forms that are simultaneously poetic and provocative. They imagine sex and desire in a time of ‘plague’ as seductive yet frightening, intimate yet isolating, compelling yet dangerous – literally, in some cases, threatening to kill or injure.

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, and raised in East London, Butt was British South Asian, Muslim by upbringing, and Queer. A contemporary of the Young British Artists, and their peer at Goldsmiths’ College, London, Butt was described by art critics as epitomising the new ‘hazardism’ in art of the 1990s, as his works often imply physical risk or endangerment.

Before his untimely death in 1994, aged 32 of AIDS-related complications, Butt had completed and shown four major sculptural works; Transmission (1990) and the three-part installation, Familiars (1992), as well as leaving behind writings, drawings and plans for new installations. Butt’s work offered a potent and critical response to HIV/AIDS, while opening up new dialogues between art and science to explore themes of precarity, toxicity, the spread of viruses, homophobia and racism – issues that continue to resonate with frightening poignancy today.

Rubbena Aurangzeb-Tariq is a London-based artist and facilitator whose work concerns culture, deaf identity and, as a deaf woman of Pakistani heritage, the multi-faceted nature of being a ‘minority within a minority.

Free parking for Blue Badge holders is available at the top of Osborn Street in the pay and display booths for an unlimited period. Spaces are available on a first come, first served basis. Step free access to all gallery spaces is available, unless stated otherwise on our website. If you have any other access needs that you would like us to know about, please contact us by email access@whitechapelgallery.org or call +44 (0)20 7522 7888.