HAMAD BUTT: FAMILIARS
Installation view of ‘Familiars’, 1992, by Hamad Butt, shown at ‘Hamad Butt: Apprehensions’, 4 June - 7 September 2025, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Damian Griffiths.
Beauty meets menace in the three-sculpture group Familiars, 1992, the key work in ‘Apprehensions’, the Whitechapel Gallery’s survey of Hamad Butt’s sadly brief career – he died of AIDS aged 32 in 1994. 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, 1987-90, and so coincided with the Young British Artists (YBA) generation, many of whom studied alongside him there.
In Familiars, glass forms contains three halogens that have both helpful and harmful potential: when first shown, the risk of leaks generated some press controversy. Butt himself explained, in a 1991 text he wrote to set out the theoretical thinking behind his planned works: ‘I am interested in the relationship between art and science, particularly the shift in modes of thought from alchemy to science (medicine and chemistry) and, more tentatively, the prospect of a metachemics, which might have an equivalent kinship to metaphysics as chemistry does to physics. What is being considered in the apprehensions that constitutes the extent of our acknowledgement of substance?’
Hamad Butt with unidentified sculptural works c. 1985–87. Image © Jamal Butt.
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 — iodine is a dense, dark, metallic shiny solid that bypasses the liquid state and becomes a purple gas between 114-184 °C. It is used as a disinfectant, and in the production of photographic chemicals, and in computer technology, but is hazardous in both its solid and gaseous states.
In Familiars 2: Hypostasis three tall, curved metal poles, reminiscent of Islamic arches, are tipped with bromine-filled tubes. ‘Hypostasis’ is a philosophical term for an underlying, fundamental state or substance, though ‘hypostases’ are the three theological components of the Godhead, bringing another set of associations. Bromine, a foul-smelling red liquid, is essential for human and animal life, as it forms the crosslinks in collagen IV, critical for tissue development and architecture. It is used in the manufacturer of disinfectants, sedatives, and petrol, but is toxic and carcinogenic and can burn skin.
Familiars 3: Cradle is named after Newton’s Cradle, which demonstrates the law of impacts between bodies. Eighteen vacuum-sealed glass spheres are filled with yellow-green chlorine gas. Chlorine is a disinfectant but it is also a pollutant and was notoriously used to make chemical weapons in World War 1 – so the lack of impact in this version of Newton’s Cradle is a relief.
Aristotle posited that objects are constituted by both a substance and properties borne by the substance but distinct from it, and Butt goes on to explain that, for him, ‘the term substance incorporates the Aristotelian definition with respect to its attributes (or accidents), but I am suggesting a correspondence of such a ‘diagnosis’ to that of health, and the identification of disease by particular symptoms, that is, by its indications. If disease is the continuum in which we locate our specific indications, and substance is that which brings into play our regard, the object of an artwork anticipates both our attraction and our fear, and the distraction that is produced … The question still remains as to whether the medicine will humour, rather than cure, the patient …’ Butt regards science analogously: the ‘potential to accident’ is the ‘inevitable ritual of the relentless progress of science and technology, a medicine that cures even as it kills.’
Installation view of ‘Familiars 3: Cradle’, 1992, by Hamad Butt, shown at ‘Hamad Butt: Apprehensions’, 4 June - 7 September 2025, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Damian Griffiths.
Reviews of the show have emphasised analogies with the experience of sexual pleasure and its concurrent risks in the AIDS era. According to Tom Denman (i) ‘the invitation to interact with the works — a metonym of sexual desire — potentializes calamity. Yet Butt’s great achievement here is to sustain amid crisis an emotional register of contemplation … that suspends us between the diverse meanings of ‘apprehension’ denoting understanding, arrest, and fear.’ Theo Gordon sets out the implied dangers of interaction (ii): ‘To capitulate to the temptation of climbing the ladder of the Substance Sublimation Unit would burn the skin and smash the already-brittle glass, releasing the toxic gas’; while the phallic spears of Hypostasis ‘seem poised either to meet or collapse, their potential energy perpetually on the point of dissipation. They seem to model the apprehension of a pre-coital encounter, which here would cause the glass to shatter and release the bromine, a toxic skin irritant’; and, finally, Cradle can be seen as testicular, and while its ‘chemical weapon is held innocuously in a form that resembles a Newton’s Cradle’, there is an ‘underbelly of threat’ in the parental protection so invoked.
Installation view of ‘Familiars 3: Cradle’ (detail), 1992, by Hamad Butt, shown at ‘Hamad Butt: Apprehensions’, 4 June - 7 September 2025, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Damian Griffiths.
The objects also have broader metaphorical potential. As the catalogue for ‘Apprehensions’ (iii) puts it ‘a viewer can imagine climbing the ladder to heavenly heights, to mystical understanding, to prophecy, and to redemption, or perhaps to material knowledge peace and aesthetic harmony. Conversely, a viewer could imagine going down the ladder into degradation, horror and darkness.’ The spikes of Hypostasis are tipped with sealed nibs of liquid bromine, as if red hot, which Denman sees as ‘penetrating a heavenly realm — which could also be hell, considering the caustic, carcinogenic substance within the glass.’ Cradle is equally multifaceted: ‘it can be a stable or a kinetic structure. It can be an object of temptation or repulsion, both asking to be touched or rapidly retreated from. The cradle can be a mundane and stupid object. Who needs an enlarged version of an executive desk toy? But it can also have a sublime impact … In Hamad’s work and in the surrounding environment, sublimation and inverse sublimation is occurring materially, mentally, and for those so inclined, spiritually.’
The installation as a whole, then, brings manifold potential associations to its investment in danger and beauty. Butt combines art and science, material and mystical matters, and formal and social concerns - as well as the potential for toxicity and healing.
‘Hamad Butt: Apprehensions’ ran at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 6 Dec 2024 – 5 May 2025, and is currently showing at the Whitechapel Gallery, London 4 June – 7 Sept 2025.
Further details available on the Whitechapel Gallery website.
Notes:
i Tom Denman: ‘Hamad Butt’s ‘Apprehensions’ in e-flux, 2025
ii Theo Gordon: ‘Hamad Butt: endlessly theorising’ in Burlington Contemporary, 2024
iii Dominic Johnson et al: ‘Hamad Butt: Apprehensions’, Prestel, 2025
Installation view of ‘Familiars’, 1992, by Hamad Butt, shown at ‘Hamad Butt: Apprehensions’, 4 June - 7 September 2025, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Damian Griffiths.
Images shown courtesy the artist, Whitechapel Gallery, TATE Collection, and the photographer © Hamad Butt and the photographer.