HAVE I EVER OPPOSED YOU? NEW ART FROM INDIA AND PAKISTAN
18 March – 22 May 2010

Ambreen Butt (b. 1969, Pakistan)





From the series ‘I must utter what comes to my lips II & III’ 2003, watercolour and white Gouache on Wasli paper, diptych: each 25 x 18 cm

Ambreen Butt has an affinity for the literary, finding inspiration in poetry, both ancient and modern, and her pictorial narratives are spun into dream-like, Kafka-esque traps of elegant absurdity. Finely drawn figures, almost always women in contemporary clothing, are set against geometrically designed backgrounds that echo traditional miniature folio borders.

September 11th, 2001, Butt said, is the day "the personal became political’’. Until then, there had been an overt fictional quality in her works. Her female subjects had been loosely based on mythical figures; she thought of them as contemporary feminist, empowered versions of the stylized nayika, the romantic or seductive heroine of traditional Persian painting. Now, she deliberately began modeling the young woman on herself, to be seen as real, specific and bemused, mentally and physically grappling with concepts and representations of politically potent ideas of ‘nationalism’, ‘language’, ‘religion’, and ‘culture’.

Born in Lahore, Ambreen Butt lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. Butt has exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston ; the Brooklyn Museum ; the Fleming Museum, Vermont ; Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Pakistan National Art Gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan. She was the first recipient of the James and Audrey Foster Prize given by the Institute of Contemporary Art. She also recently received the Maud Morgan Prize from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.