Embers of Eclipsed Memory (right)
Vadehra Art Gallery presents a solo exhibition of recent works by British–Pakistani artist Faiza Butt, titled you miss more than you see. The exhibition will be on view at our contemporary gallery space from 15 October to 12 November 2024.
Faiza Butt’s practice addresses the dichotomy between culture and history, bringing the contemporary zeitgeist into focus and question with as much fervency as the historical legacies of ancient cultures. She takes inspiration from cultural iconography and traditions via a global smorgasbord and imbues them with biographical elements or psychological truths from her own life. She has long been interested in exposing her subjects to a process of aestheticization and exploring our visceral impulses towards how images of beauty and alterity travel across time and cultures. The juxtaposition of a spectrum of elements, emotions, narratives and truths becomes a metaphor for living, framing the subject’s as well as Butt’s own multi-dimensional identity as a parent, woman and immigrant.
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Butt often uses her own children as a lens to examine the compounding effects of a technologically driven world, where notions of ‘presence’ and ‘contact’ are under threat of re-issue. As we entrench ourselves further into a third intermediary state of ‘screen time’ in various arenas of the virtual world, the cognitive binaries of ‘sleeping’ and ‘awake’ states no longer book-end our inferences and imaginations. Instead, our faculties devolve further into confusion and indecisiveness, and we grow desensitized, disoriented and disassociated, invoking our own absences through technological mobility. In this recent suite of paintings, Butt’s arrangement of modern bodies in classical poses, inspired by the French school of painting, critiques her son and daughter’s solipsistic, askew glances as a new self-absorbed way of being. Set against historical and cultural markers of identification – from the decorative pingfeng or Chinese room dividers to the intricate, embroidered tapestries reflective of Eastern interiors, along with their gilded framing – locates these paintings between the ineffability of the past and the ambiguity of the future speculating on painting’s cyclical relationship with art history as well as the impact of globalization on immigrant culture.
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in 1973 in Lahore, Pakistan, Faiza Butt trained at the National College of Arts in Lahore and later obtained a master’s degree with distinction at the Slade School of Art in London. She also received a teaching certificate from the Institute of Education. Although living in London, Butt’s Pakistani roots are clearly evident in her work as she brings to our attention various social, gender and political issues faced by a young Pakistani. In the past, her work has taken a critical look on the stronghold of the patriarchal society in Pakistan and the impact of violent images, which appear regularly in all forms of media, on children. Butt’s elaborate drawings are obsessively crafted with passion and rigour, and create surfaces that hover between photography and embroidery. She has had various solo shows, including Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong (2023); Grosvenor Gallery, London (2021); the Attenborough Art Centre, UK (2016); the Art Exchange, UK (2015); Rossi & Rossi, London (2014); Canvas Gallery, Karachi (2014); Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (2012); and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York (2012), among others. In 2021, a solo presentation of her paintings and sculptures was shown by Vadehra Art Gallery at Art Basel OVR: Portals. Her mid-career retrospective Paracosm opened at the New Art Exchange in April 2015. It travelled to the Art Exchange at the University of Essex in November 2015, then opening at the Attenborough Centre of Arts (University of Leicester) in October 2016, as the final chapter of its tour. The specially commissioned installation ‘Paracosm’ was shown at the Alchemy Festival at South Bank, London in May 2017. Butt has been invited to exhibit at the prestigious Venice Biennale, on three occasions. Her show Personal Structures is currently on display, at Palazzo Bembo, at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale 2024. She has also participated in many group shows, including Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (2021); Grosvenor Gallery, London (2020); Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts (2020); New Arts Exchange, Nottingham (2019); Aicon Gallery, New York (2019); Free World Centre, London (2016); Gujral Foundation, New Delhi (2015); Leila Heller Chelsea Gallery, New York (2014); SOAS, University of London (2014); and the Contemporary Arts Centre, Boston (2013), among others. Her work can also be found in private and public collections, including the British Museum, London; the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; and the Burger Collection, Hong Kong, to name a few. Butt was awarded a UNESCO-Aschberg Bursary and was artist-in- residence at the Bartle Arts Trust (BAT) in Durban, South Africa, in 1995. She was nominated for the Jameel Prize by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in 2011, and was a finalist for the Sovereign Art Prize, Hong Kong, in 2009. The artist lives and works in London, UK.
Words Platform Desk
Date 28.10.2024
