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Asim Butt (artist)
Asim Butt (26 March 1978 – 15 January 2010)[1][2] was a Pakistani painter and sculptor, with an interest in graffiti and printmaking.[3] He was also a member of the Stuckism International art movement and founder of The Karachi Stuckists.[4] Life and workAsim Butt was born in Karachi. He attended Li Po Chun United World College. He started painting at an early age, but at his parents' insistence, went to college, where he studied Social Sciences from the Lahore University of Management Sciences.[3] He began a Ph.D. in History at University of California, Davis (UC Davis) in California, United States of America, but left the course after two years, when he participated in a group show mounted at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery in March 2002 with Rigo '02 and LYRIC. He then returned to enroll in a B.F.A. in Painting in Karachi. He participated in group shows in Karachi and Lahore, and in 2003 painted two murals in the environs of the shrine to the 8th Century Sufi saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi. This is an area visited by many people each day and also home to many of Karachi's homeless, including transgender people, beggers and drug addicts. One mural, about America's Shock and Awe campaign in Iraq, was called, 5 Ways to Kill a Man,[5] inspired by Edwin Brock's poem. The other was about glue-sniffing children he encountered, while painting the first mural. Both murals were later whitewashed by city authorities.
He spoke out against the imposition of emergency regulations[3] in November 2007 by starting an "art protest" movement[6]—spray-stencilling graffiti of an "eject" symbol of a red triangle over a red rectangle, an image which has now become widespread in Karachi.[5] Butt said it was a representation to:
He was caught on two occasions and claimed it was school art project work.[6] He says that people's dignity has been overtaken by the predominant social and economic power of the military.[3] While Butt increasingly came to view public political art as central to his art practice, he continued painting on canvas. Butt publicly and openly identified himself as gay even in the face of social pressure to avoid doing so. Nevertheless, he was ambivalent about being viewed as a "gay artist" preferring to describe himself as an "artist who happened to be gay." Much of Butt's art practice, including his public art, explored themes of gender, sexuality and masculinity and the male physique. He described Pakistani attitudes to homosexuality in these words: "Pakistanis are generally tolerant of homosexuality but don't like to bring sexual politics into public. Men and women engage in homosexual acts without necessarily identifying themselves as 'gay'. However, western ideas of about [sic] sexuality do shape the identity and cultural practices of a growing middle-class 'gay' community."[7] He lived in Karachi's affluent Defence Housing Authority neighbourhood with his parents.[3] DeathAsim Butt died on 15 January 2010, a news report stating that he had committed suicide by hanging himself in his residence.[2] References
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