Ambreen Butt: What is left of me

Ambreen Butt’s What is left of me addresses current political oppression and violence globally through large-scale resin installations and collage-based works. The creation of each piece is labor intensive and built upon meditative repetitive forms. Butt studied traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting at the National College of Art in Lahore and has built a unique visual language based upon that training.

Throughout her practice, Butt continually engages with themes of feminism, globalization, and identity. Earlier works on paper from the Dirty Pretty series present direct visual quotations from historical miniaturist works intermingled with images pulled from news media. Butt’s more recent works are comprised of resin casts of fingers or locks, chains, and hooks, brought together to create ornamental patterning that is reminiscent of sacred geometries. In contrast, her collage works are created from shredded dollar bills and socially charged texts. For the series In God We Trust, Butt reinterprets the iconography of US currency in swirling lines of paper. In her text-based works, the source material is obscured beyond recognition, leaving only the title and single words to give insight into its original meaning. In the diptych, Pages of Deception, the text seen in the two mirrored panels was taken from both the defense and prosecution transcripts of a trial on terrorism. Manipulated through dyes and painstaking deconstruction, the content of the trial is lost and the ability to discern which side is which is all but impossible.