by Pierre d’Alancaisez, The Critic
The programmes of cultural institutions have taken a very queer turn of late. This year’s celebrations of Pride — the annual orgy of rainbow flags in which museums and galleries were once fully invested — have taken a bit of a nose-dive. Corporate sponsors pulled out of parties and marches whose organisers have become increasingly embroiled in internal disputes. The once celebratory “queering” of everyone and everything in the cultural record has given way to reflection. If only a couple of years ago, galleries celebrated difference, their queer programmes today focus on a rather different agenda: death.
London art institutions, in particular, have become fixated on the AIDS crisis. 2025 has seen a remarkable number of high-profile exhibitions that reflect on the relationship between sex, death, and the cultural artefacts that the two give rise to. Major shows that opened in close succession this Spring and Summer — of the activism of Gregg Bordowitz, the club life of Leigh Bowery, and the funerial anxiety of Hamad Butt — ascribe this intellectual project. Despite themselves, these shows unsettle contemporary art’s jubilant queer aesthetics.
The late Hamad Butt’s Apprehensions, a sparse exhibition of sculpture and drawings at Whitechapel Gallery, is as far from “love is love” as it is sayable today. In a brief career before his AIDS-related death in 1994 at the age of merely thirty-two, Butt made a handful of installations that meditate on desire and peril. The show’s centrepiece is Familiars 3: Cradle, a giant reproduction of the business executive’s desk toy which served as a status symbol in the age of American Psycho. Butt’s version is made of glass and filled with chlorine.