Terrence Higgins Trust - 2024, Timed Auction

Faiza Butt was born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1973. Her work has been exhibited at various art fairs, such as Art Dubai and the Hong Kong Art Fair, Frieze and Art Basel. Butt will be exhibiting at the upcoming prestigious Venice Biennale 20234.

Butt’s concepts are socially purposeful. Her protagonists are anti-hero and often picked out of images of discrimination, prejudice and poverty. Butt’s elaborate drawings are obsessively crafted with passion and rigour, and create surfaces that hover between photography and embroidery. Born into a family of five sisters, feminist themes are close to her heart.

In Wraps, we see two sisters, together forming a shape of wrapped bundles. The wrap evokes particular narratives of culture, deprivation and social status. The cosmos wraps behind them – a constant motif in Butt’s work, that binds her narratives together. The drawing is rendered in fine dots, an archetypal example of Butt’s practise. The layering of the fine ink dots is reminiscent of the ‘purdakht’ technique of Indo-Persian miniatures.

Donated by Faiza Butt