LONDON.- 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.

Hamad Butt: Apprehensions brings together these iconic installations for the first time, alongside previously unseen paintings and drawings. Familiars, which is presented across the ground floor gallery, is designed around three toxic elements: bromine (as a liquid), chlorine (as a gas) and iodine (as solid crystals).

The works are permeated with a sense of danger; all three sculptures are arranged to emphasise the looming threat of these toxic chemicals being released into the environment.

Familiars 1: Substance Sublimation Unit is a steel ladder made of glass rungs, each filled with an electrical element and crystals of solid iodine. The current ascends the ladder, intermittently heating the rungs, causing the iodine to sublimate into a purple vapour. In Familiars 3: Cradle, named after Newton’s cradle, 18 vacuum-sealed glass spheres are filled with lethal yellow-green chlorine gas. If smashed together, the gas – a respiratory irritant – would be released into the air. In Familiars 2: Hypostasis, three tall, curved metal poles, reminiscent of Islamic arches, contain bromine-filled tubes at the tips.

Transmission weaves Christian and Islamic iconography, as well as references to religious, spiritual, or hermetic orders of knowledge, such as alchemy. Shown in the upper gallery, nine glass books, raised on rehals (Quran stands) and arranged in a circle on the floor, are lit by ultraviolet lamps. The threatening image of a triffid, a fictional plant that blinds and eats humans from John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic novel The Day of the Triffids (1951), is etched onto the glass of each book. Visitors are invited to don protective glasses to screen out the ultraviolet light. Transmission was Butt’s earliest sculptural exploration of science and art, faith and danger and, ultimately, life and death. He made the work in the immediate context of the AIDS epidemic. Butt explained, ‘there was a play with the whole notion of blind faith, in faith in written things, which I was equating with the transmission of disease.’

Butt was a prolific maker of paintings, etchings and works on paper, which will be displayed together for the first time in the upstairs galleries, alongside rarely seen archival material, including sketches, personal videos and written notes. The exhibition will also present a reconstruction of a lost element of Transmission, originally made for Butt’s final degree show at Goldsmiths in 1990, which he later destroyed. It comprises a glass-fronted wooden noticeboard within which a colony of bluebottle flies feed on paper printed with prophetic texts.

Butt’s work often invokes the perceived threat of the racial, religious or national outsider. His references to the end of the world remind us of our own precarious state today – blighted by pandemics, looming environmental disaster and the ongoing migration crisis.

Hamad Butt: Apprehensions is accompanied by a fully illustrated monograph published by Prestel, that includes contributions from esteemed art historians, curators and artists, as well as Butt’s own writings. Essays explore Butt’s encounters with science and alchemy, his relationships with diasporic and Queer communities in the 1990s, and his legacy. An accompanying public programme will also bring new voices to his practice.

Hamad Butt: Apprehensions 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.

Hamad Butt was born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1962 and moved to live in East London with his family in 1964. He studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths from 1987 to 1990 and coincided with the Young British Artists (YBA) generation, many of whom studied alongside him there. His earliest works include countless paintings and prints, which were shown in exhibitions around London and the UK from 1983-87, including at Brixton Gallery, Walker Art Gallery, South London Gallery and London Lesbian and Gay Centre. From the late 1980s, Butt developed unprecedented large-scale sculptural installations using toxic or dangerous materials. His later works were exhibited at John Hansard Gallery (Southampton); Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain); Whitechapel Gallery; Milch; Institute of Contemporary Arts (all London); Manchester Art Gallery; and elsewhere. He continued to make works on paper throughout this time. Butt died of AIDS- related complications in London in 1994, aged 32. A book on his work, Familiars, was published posthumously in 1996. His work is in the permanent collections of Tate and IMMA.