WeTransfer x TalkArt special episode recorded live at Whitechapel Gallery. 

Recorded in front of a sold out live audience at @WhitechapelGallery we speak with @DominicJohnson and Jamal Butt to explore the current HAMAD BUTT exhibition: his life, art and legacy. 

❤️ Thank you to @WePresent for organising this exciting event!

Apprehensions is the first major survey of #HamadButt (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.

Follow: @WhitechapelGallery and @WePresent and check out WePresent today to see a series of never-before-seen artworks by Hamad, generously shared by Jamal.

This episode is brought to you by our friends at WePresent, the Academy Award winning

arts platform of WeTransfer. Collaborating with emerging young talent to renowned artists

such as Marina Abramović, Riz Ahmed and Talk Art's own Russell Tovey, WePresent

showcases the best in art, photography, film, music, literature and more, championing

diversity in everything it does.

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