Risking Fear: Hamad Butt at Whitechapel Gallery

In a large room, yellow glass bulbs were suspended from the ceiling, arranged like pendulums in a Newton’s cradle, lingering precariously about a foot from the floor. Their color resulted from chlorine gas mixed with water. Nearby, a ladder stood erect against a wall with illuminated glass rungs glowing sporadically, red and iridescent. The red rungs were created by infrared lamps and heaters that continuously turned crystal iodine from solid to gas and back again. Elsewhere, a trio of pointed glass-and-steel needlelike objects arched toward one another. Each object contained bromine, which is reddish-brown when in liquid form. Chlorine, iodine, and bromine are all halogens that are highly reactive and lethal in large quantities, and are known for their use in purification and as antiseptics.

These toxin-filled sculptures—Familiars 1: Substance Sublimation Unit, Familiars 2: Hypostasis, and Familiars 3: Cradle (all 1992)—were recently on view in Apprehensions, a survey of artist Hamad Butt at Whitechapel Gallery in London. Much of Butt’s work employs complex and volatile materials, such as noxious gases and chemicals, to suspend viewers in a state of fear, where being close to the work means being in proximity to potential harm. Each sculpture in Butt’s Familiars series indexes some kind of potential: the Newton’s cradle in Cradle suggests play; the ladder in Substance Sublimation Unit, the promise of ascent; the arches in Hypostasis, something you may enter. And yet, the specious form of the works produces in viewers a contradictory reception. We are made aware that the potential of chlorine-filled glass pendulums knocking into each other could cause injury, and yet, we are drawn into their orbit.

Installation view of Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2025. Photo: Damian Griffiths.

Much of Butt’s work at Whitechapel was created while he was living in seropositivity. By the time he finished Familiars, AIDS was the leading cause of death for men ages fifteen to forty-four. He was making this work at a time when notions of toxicity and risk were being radically transformed by a pandemic that produced its own iconography of fear, where the disease was mapped continuously onto “other” bodies. The exhibition opened with Familiars, which viewers encountered before Butt’s early paintings on canvas, as well as sparse but stunning works on paper made in the early ’90s. These paintings and drawings, located on the second floor of the gallery, are populated with hyphenated lines, graphs, cross-hatching, architectural references, bare light bulbs, and a solitary figure with his eyes closed. They mark Butt’s versatility and development as a young artist, through both his obvious mimicry of Matisse and Picasso in his early paintings and his later stripped-down pastel-and-pencil works on paper. Though materially divergent from Butt’s sculptures, these works evoke an analogous feeling of apprehension, as communicated by the exhibition’s title. A persistent rumination on prophetic characters and symbols across the paintings and drawings, as well as an ambient violence that seems to lie at the edge of them, contributed to the exhibition’s elliptical quality. Male figures are caught continuously in isolated and contemplative repose, some in the act of self-harm, while muzzled dogs appear.

Butt laid out a theory on “apprehensions”—and how his work confronts them—for a text that accompanied the last exhibition he had in his lifetime: “Apprehensions take hold of what is fearful by casting it in the name of a particular other. Apprehension is not comprehension but slides into that realm by the conviction (the call to order in court) of the grasp; the palpable ‘laying hold of’ that can indicate understanding just as it indicates fear. An index with which to explore the imaging of fear of disease.” The meaning of apprehension is circuitous here. Though the word indicates a failure in understanding, it also describes a desperate operation to make our fear legible by projecting it onto an other. Butt mobilizes apprehension in his representations of our “fear of disease,” revealing our refusal to remain in a state of fear, while urging us to risk doing so.

Private view for Familiars at Milch, London, 1994. Image © Jamal Butt.

In 1995, at the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the British journalist David Lister wrote an op-ed labeling several young artists “the Hazardists.” Working independently—not as a collective—the proponents of Lister’s “Hazardism” included artists Damien Hirst, Rebecca Horn, Christo, and Butt. Lister provocatively describes the emergence of this new movement in contemporary art as wantonly porous and threatening—smelling, rotting, leaking onto the gallery floor. “Contemporary art is fast becoming a health hazard,” he writes, with visitors “having to ask themselves not only ‘Is it art?’, but ‘Is it safe?’” While Hirst and Butt (who overlapped as students at Goldsmiths) used strikingly similar materials early in their careers, Lister’s grouping flattens the social contexts in which they made these works. As Hirst produced formaldehyde-suspended animals and innocuous large-scale installations, paid for by Charles Saatchi of Saatchi Galleries, Butt, who was born in Lahore and immigrated to London as a child, explored toxicity and themes of fear and death with a considerably different degree of risk than the other Hazardists. However, Lister’s supposition of contemporary art as both deliberately confounding and a threat to one’s material existence sets up a curious contract between the spectator, the artwork, the artist, and more specifically, the museum, which must manage risk and any potential harm to the spectator.

In the sanitized space of the museum, safety is expected through containment, control, and rehearsal. It took years for the Tate to acquire any of Butt’s work, finally doing so in 2014 through a donation by the artist’s brother and the executor of his estate, Jamal Butt, after several failed attempts to sell them to the institution. The reticence of museums to show and store the work appears to stem from the volatility of the sculptures, which register both a capriciousness and a lethality. And yet, as Andrew Cummings notes, the Tate had already acquired many other toxic pieces, including two formaldehyde works by Hirst and a work by Horn containing mercury. In comparison, Butt’s sculptures went through several risk evaluations prior to ever being exhibited—which led the artist to change the glass from borosilicate to a more heat-resistant quartz, install emergency shutoffs, and dilute the chemicals within the sculptures themselves. It seems that what led institutions like the Tate to resist acquisition of Butt’s art was less the materials he used than the way his work operates within the production of the museum, critically bringing our attention to the persistent risk, in its various registers, of the contamination of the body.

Detail from Fly Piece from Transmission, 1990/2024. Image © Jamal Butt.

The sensationalization of Butt’s sculptures as “health hazards” obscures the more difficult aspects at the heart of his practice. His work engages several conceptualizations of risk: to be perceived as a risk (Butt as brown, Muslim, South Asian); to engage in risky behavior (“sexual deviancy”); to be an at-risk population (queer, immigrant); and, for the spectator, to “enter at your own risk.” Butt exploits this stratification of risk to show how fear is mapped, manufactured, and culturally produced—through the fear of contamination, of others, of disease, of AIDS. He shows us how the queer person, the foreigner, and the racialized subject are mobilized as “others” onto whom fear is projected. The epidermalization of risk is made ineffective through Butt’s use of gaseous substances, emphasizing the communicability between inanimate and animate material, between the sick and the healthy. Familiars is invariably a comment on the scientific, social, and cultural conceptions of contamination and risk—as well as its production, management, and containment. The sculptures hold inanimate life, chemicals, that have the ability to enact change beyond our control.

At Whitechapel, before each person entered the room with the sculpture Transmission (1990), a gallery attendant offered them a pair of nondescript safety glasses meant to shield their eyes from ultraviolet rays. Inside, viewers were lured to a circle of glowing objects on the floor. The objects, nine glass books emitting a clinical blue light, each rested on what is meant to resemble a Quran stand. The books are inscribed with drawings of a triffid—a fictional and carnivorous plant from John Wyndham’s science-fiction novel The Day of the Triffids (Michael Joseph, 1951). The triffids are noticeably phallic-shaped; in the novel, they are described as an invasive and foreign species whose poisonous touch kills instantly. As visitors circled the installation, they encountered each book’s sequentially turned pages, though the final open book, pressed nearly flush against the wall, was inaccessible. Near the room’s entrance, on a wall facing the radiating books, was a glass display case—like one would find in a church hallway—labeled with the word TRANSMISSION in gold, administrative lettering. The case contained texts on paper treated with a sugar solution, as well as fly pupae that hatched, fed on the paper, and died over the course of the exhibition. This piece is a recreation of Butt’s original, which was destroyed by the artist after Damien Hirst’s conspicuous plagiarism of it in his sculpture A Thousand Years (1990), in which flies are bred inside a clear vitrine that also includes a rotting cow’s head and an insect electrocutor. The provocation of Hirst’s sculpture lies not in the demand that its concept might have on the spectator but in its impulse for subversion: Spectators are meant to feel disgust at, or perhaps pleasure in, the spectacle of the flies’ execution.

Installation view of Hamad Butt: Apprehensions, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2025. Photo: Damian Griffiths.

One of the phrases in Butt’s display case reads, “We have the blindness of fear and the books of fear.” Transmission produces a paradoxical encounter: The textual objects, with their multiple meanings (history, religion, the mass circulation of knowledge), are in tension with the ultraviolet light that has the potential to burn our retinas, blinding us from the truth that may or may not lie between the pages. If we take the triffids as a placeholder for the foreigner or for those living with HIV—as Butt may have meant them to be understood—we see how blindness and blind faith might refer to how fear is constructed and distributed through larger forces and institutions. Butt could be suggesting, for example, how fear proliferated in the general public through the media’s dissemination of misinformation surrounding HIV/AIDS. These include erroneous theories on transmission and the inaccurate characterization of HIV as the “4-H disease,” used to describe those supposedly most at risk: homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians. As historian Sander L. Gilman notes, “People have been stigmatized (and destroyed) as much by the ‘idea’ of AIDS as by its reality.” We cannot look at the illuminated books without the mediating force of the safety glasses, which promise us protection while in the proximity of risk, but we know, too, that this safety is staged.

The last room of the exhibition held a promise, or the hope of the work continuing. It was filled with ephemera: sketches of works in progress, photographs of Butt, journal entries, and an informal video interview from 1994 between the artist and his brother. In the video, Butt lies on the couch in a notably domestic setting. A child plays nearby, on and off camera, occasionally obscuring Butt’s words with her exuberant shrieks. He speaks of his intention of developing new work, projects that will take years to complete. He wants to experiment with music, film, even making a book. Butt would die six months later, at age thirty-two, from an HIV-related illness. Risk, and being at risk, has become the exclusive realm of the individual in the neoliberal, biopolitical management of life. That is, risk, especially the burden of contagion and illness, falls on perceived “at risk” populations, further sequestering care to clandestine networks and isolated sufferers, much like the treatment of HIV/AIDS when Butt was ill. His toxic art might act as a potential pharmakon—both a poison and a cure—showing us our entanglement in the production of risk. It forces us to negotiate with the potential that our bodies will be transgressed, that we will be contaminated.