Last month, Tate Britain’s first rehang of its collection in a decade provoked a blizzard of controversy, with detractors railing against the supposedly “woke” prioritising of politics over aesthetics. Regardless, the London gallery clearly saw a need to update their offering to reflect how the story of contemporary British art has evolved – and to encompass the many important players who had previously been left out. Familiar names such as Tracey Emin and Antony Gormley remain, but they are now on an equal footing with less exposed artists such as Donald Rodney and Ingrid Pollard. One particularly exciting addition is the little-known Pakistani-born artist Hamad Butt, whose striking 1990 installation Transmission has been given a whole room.
Created at the height of the Aids epidemic in Europe and the US, Transmission evokes multiple terrors. Donning safety goggles at the entrance, you encounter a darkened space with nine open glass books, lit by UV lamps, arranged in a circle on the floor as if for some cabalistic ritual. Through the eerie glow, an etching looms on each book of a triffid, the giant carnivorous plants that overrun Earth after a blinding meteor shower in John Wyndham’s 1951 sci-fi novel The Day of the Triffids. On the wall, nine cryptic statements pronounce things like: “We have the eruption of the Triffid that obscures sex with death” and “We have the blindness of fear and the books of fear”. The piece explores fears of the foreign invader, of deadly desire (through the distinctly phallic-looking triffid), of literal blindness as well as blind faith, the open tomes recalling a madrasa or a witch’s coven.
