Hamad Butt: Apprehensions
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
★★★★★
Hamad Butt was a British-Pakistani artist who died of Aids at the age of just 34. Now, 30 years after his untimely death, Butt’s work is undergoing a process of rehabilitation thanks to the combined efforts of the Tate and Whitechapel Gallery, in London, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Situated in Imma’s House Galleries, Apprehensions is a retrospective of the artist’s small but compelling body of work. The exhibition title is taken from Butt’s own writing: as part of his undergraduate thesis he reflected on the meanings of the word “apprehension”, being particularly interested in the contrast between apprehension as understanding and as a state of anxious anticipation.
The first floor is devoted to Butt’s early artistic experiments, including several impressive paintings, which Butt mostly completed while a student at Goldsmiths. Butt’s presence at the London art school from 1987 to 1990 is an intriguing aspect of his story, as this was the period of the Young British Artists: the likes of Damien Hirst, Liam Gillick and Gillian Wearing were all in attendance at this time, and Butt was close with many of them, while staying at the margins of their incipient movement.
On the ground floor you find Butt’s first installation, Transmission. The mainstay of Butt’s undergraduate degree show, Transmission features an animated video of a triffid, the rampaging plant monster from John Wyndham’s science-fiction classic, a series of works on paper, a display case containing live flies, and a central installation consisting of nine glass books. The spine of each book is a UV light. (The museum provides visitors with protective glasses, as overexposure to ultraviolet light can result in retinal damage.) Etched on the wall in gold lettering are a series of statements, including, “We have the eruption of the Triffid that obscures sex with death,” and, “We have the danger of blind faith (prayer) and the transmission of faithlessness (distraction).”
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This air of incipient threat is developed further in Butt’s second installation, Familiars, spread across the ground and basement floors. There are three works, impressively engineered, that involve the delicate containment of a pure halogen, a chemical substance with toxic properties.
Hypostasis forms an arch of steel poles; at the apex of each are long glass tips containing liquid bromine. The second, Cradle, is named after Newton’s cradle, the energy-conservation toy we more readily associate with office desks. Instead of steel balls, however, Butt constructed a series of handblown glass containers, suspended from steel wires, and impregnated them with chlorine gas. Finally, Substance Sublimation Unit is a ladder, and each rung a vacuum containing iodine. A timer successively switches on an infrared heat source within the vacuums, and the iodine crystals sublimate, transforming into a hazardous gas.
I admitted to a friend beforehand that I was sceptical about the exhibition. Tragic though Butt’s story was, I wondered how mature this young artist’s work could be, how developed the ideas or the execution. My scepticism was undeserved. I leave Imma with the sense that I have witnessed something very profound: a singular voice, a prophet of dread wielding precise, precarious instruments. Butt’s work has to be seen.
Hamad Butt: Apprehensions is at Imma, Dublin, until May 5th, 2025; it is then at Whitechapel Gallery, London, from June 4th to September 7th
