Dominic Johnson & Jamal Butt on Hamad Butt (presented by Whitechapel Gallery and WePresent)

Talk Art

Russell Tovey and Robert Diament c/o Independent Talent

Sculpture, Unknown, Russell Tovey, Painting, Drawing, Art, Artist Interview, Arts, Studio Visit, Visual Arts, Art Talk, Contemporary Art, Entertainment, Celebrity, Modern Art, Artwork, Talk Art, Robert Diament

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2025

⏱️ 73 minutes

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Summary

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.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world.
0:07.8	I'm Russell Tovey.
0:08.7	And I'm Robert Diamette.
0:09.7	And this is Talkart.
0:10.7	Welcome to Talk Art.
0:16.9	How are you today, Robert?
0:19.6	Before we actually get to that, I just want to say this is a talk art live.
0:22.3	And we are here at the Whitechapel Gallery in East London with We Present and We transfer.
0:27.8	And I want to say a big thank you to the Whitechapel Gallery for having us and for all of you for coming.
0:31.3	Woo-woo!
0:31.6	It's so cool.
0:34.4	Well, how are you feeling now, then?
0:36.7	Today, Russell, I am feeling familiar, like a witch is familiar,
0:43.7	which you might not know what that is,
0:45.9	but it's basically referenced within this show that we're about to talk about
0:49.9	because of, in European folklore, there's this kind of thing of witches
0:54.0	and they would have animals, maybe like a cat,
0:56.1	and it was seen to have like a demon spirit within it.
0:59.5	So that's me.
1:00.3	I am the demon spirit.
1:02.2	I'm also feeling like an alchemist
1:06.0	because when I was thinking about today's artists
	...

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