Fatima Butt

Butt’s research examines the colonization of the subcontinent’s soil through consumption, decay, and collective reclamation. Her practice finds its grounding in the kitchen and the garden, where the everyday acts of tending soil, chopping potatoes, eating, and chatting become the site of making. Her process begins with reading, tracking the absurd travelogues of British botanists like William Griffith as they journeyed through pre-partition Pakistan, logging the subcontinent as an orientalist spectacle. Her henna drawings act as a direct, satirical response to these recorded histories. Moving away from academic hierarchies, she turns to immediate conversations, treating recipes, oral histories, and domestic practices as vital archives of knowledge. Through material exploration, Butt pushes the cyclical boundaries of growing, harvesting, and decomposing, eventually pressing these elements back into the earth. Working with potatoes, she reflects on how a moment of personal grief can suddenly anchor us back into a larger, collective history of loss. She maps these parallels onto the soil, while the body's final stage is lowered into the dark ground to decay, the root vegetable waits under that same earth to see the light of day, uncovering a shared hope for light.

Personal website.