Hamad Butt – Apprehensions at Whitechapel Gallery

I didn’t expect to be so drawn in by Apprehensions. I’m not someone who understands science well, and yet Hamad Butt makes chemistry and biology feel like something else entirely, like they belong just as much to art, theology, and mysticism. His installations sit in front of you like sacred objects, but they’re also mortal ones. Fragile, transparent, paused in time. Magnetic but unsettling. Beautiful to look at, but dangerous if disturbed. That tension holds the whole room. There is silence, but it isn’t empty, it feels heavy, present. It also holds the pull between theology, ritual, mysticism and rational thought. I’m not religious, but that tension drew me in immediately.

On the ground floor is Familiars, his 1992 triptych of toxic sculptures:

Cradle: a Newton’s cradle of 18 glass spheres filled with chlorine gas, deadly stuff used in WWI. Beautiful, glowing yellow-green, and terribly fragile. Knock one and it’s toxic release.

Hypostasis: three curved metal arms topped with glass tubes of liquid bromine. Burning, corrosive, chemically dangerous. The word “hypostasis” comes from Greek philosophy and early Christian theology meaning “essence” or “substance.” It also echoes Islamic architecture, the hypostyle halls of mosques.

Substance Sublimation Unit: a steel ladder with glass rungs holding iodine crystals that, when heated, turn into purple vapour. Ladders often represent ascent, knowledge, reaching for the divine. Here, that climb is fragile and risky like Jacob's ladder in the Bible.

(Gossip fact: this work once leaked at the Tate and made national news, giving its tension an eerie modern mythology.)

Knowing Butt’s story adds another layer. He was diagnosed with HIV in the 80s and died at only 32. His mortality, resilience, and queerness live inside these works. The fragility of glass and substance isn’t just material; it’s a metaphor for his own life and for so many others lost to the AIDS crisis. It’s impossible to separate the art from that history and you shouldn’t.

Upstairs, the tone shifts. The drawings are quieter, full of symbols: moons, arches, schematic forms that look like prayers or diagrams. They echo the installations below, offering a more human afterimage to the scientific theatre downstairs.

And then the flies. Transmission is hard to look at. I found it uncomfortable too (and fascinating, it is one of the most shocking, raw, and visceral works I have seen lately. Moving, literally), but that’s the point. It traps you just as the flies are trapped. Drawn to sweetness, then to mortality, they force you to face cycles of beauty and decay. In the context of Butt’s life and death, they speak about illness as a social marker, how fear and disgust can be turned against vulnerable people. Exactly how it happened during the HIV crisis.

Next to it, the UV-lit books add another twist. You need the right light and protective goggles to see them, so looking becomes procedural, almost ritualised or clinical, depending on your view. That mirrors how knowledge about illness and bodies is often controlled or mediated. But the books also glow with beauty once revealed, reminding us that seeing and understanding are never neutral. They carry echoes of religion too, sacred books that only open under certain conditions, texts meant to be read in circles.

Here’s where I want to push harder. The works are rigorous and theatrical, but the exhibition risks aestheticising fragility without fully naming the politics behind it. The AIDS crisis, public neglect, homophobia, these are not footnotes but central to the power of the work. The danger is that we get swept up in the beauty of glass and vapour and forget the systems that made them so charged. The show gestures toward these contexts but could be bolder in making them explicit.

Another layer is the question of authenticity. These works were once technically hazardous. Their reconstructions raise questions about safety and spectacle. The myth of past danger is now part of their aura, but without context it risks becoming just drama although I am here for it. The risk should remind us of something bigger than itself.

In the end, Apprehensions is disturbingly alive. I really enjoyed it and the conversation around it and art lasted with another curator friend who invited me to see this show together before its closing. Butt refuses to tidy contradictions: science and mysticism, beauty and harm, tenderness and stigma live in the same breath. The exhibition asks us to sit with those tensions, to accept that looking can wound, that knowledge can both protect and exclude. If there’s one demand the show leaves me with, it’s this: don’t just admire the beauty or the craft. Remember the politics and the living homophobia and abandonment of care of our queer friends and family. Make those truths as visible as the purple vapour and the glass spheres.