LONDON — There is something both frightening and fascinating about a sculpture that could kill you. Hamad Butt’s Familiars (1992) is a series of three sculptures that, if broken, could toxify the air and cause significant harm. “Familiars 3: Cradle” resembles a huge Newton’s cradle, common as a desk toy, wherein a ball is dropped against a stationary line of similar balls, causing the one at the other end to swing away before it falls back to repeat the process. In this case, however, the spheres are made of vacuum-sealed glass containing greenish-yellow chlorine gas — playing with this toy would spell disaster.
This series exemplifies Butt’s career-long exploration of risk and contagion. Made at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and shortly after the artist’s own diagnosis, which would lead to his premature death two years later, Familiars throws oblique light on the threat of disease and the complex, often contradictory emotions thrown up by the risk of contagion. Another piece in the series, “Familiars 1: Substance Sublimation Unit,” consists of a ladder whose rungs are glass tubes containing a heating element and iodine crystals. The heaters periodically turn on and off, sublimating the iodine into an eerie purple gas, again both fear-inducing and alluring.
These are confident, conceptually complex, and allusive works, coolly holding their own in the large space of the opening gallery. Their minimalist and scientific aesthetic also offers an intriguing foil to some of the artist’s earlier paintings and drawings, displayed upstairs. A wall text notes that Butt saw his sculptures and paintings as closely connected, particularly in terms of color, but while his sculptures are more formal, his works on paper and canvas are significantly more figurative. “No Title: Figures with Muzzles” (c. 1984) shows nude men being chased into a body of water by dogs in barbed-wire muzzles. The scene, apparently lit by a bare lightbulb, feels both bleak and emotional, perhaps drawing from Butt’s experience of being a queer Pakistani in Britain in the 1980s.
Symbols of fear and contagion emerge repeatedly throughout Butt’s oeuvre. One series of drawings from 1990 features illustrations of triffids, the menacing plants from John Wyndham’s 1951 sci-fi novel The Day of the Triffids. Butt draws a parallel between these monstrous plants and HIV’s indifference to human life, which he saw as an unstoppable force intent on fulfilling its destiny.
These drawings are directly connected to the installation “Transmissions” (1990), which consists of nine glass books engraved with a triffid and illuminated by ultraviolet light, which can cause damage to human eyes. Visitors are encouraged to put on protective glasses to view the installation, which draws attention to the scapegoating of sexual and racial minorities during the AIDs crisis and beyond. Here, as elsewhere, Butt’s work cleverly and powerfully plays with our sense of fear, examining its source, whether instinctual or instilled in us by political, religious, or media manipulation. In his hands, contagion becomes both poetic device and devastating lived reality — and we are invited to share the complicated emotions it evokes.
Hamad Butt: Apprehensions continues at Whitechapel Gallery (77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London, England) through September 7. The exhibition was organized by the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Whitechapel Gallery, and curated by Dominic Johnson, Gilane Tawadros, and Seán Kissane.
