Ambreen Butt | Say My Name

“The reason that I choose to pick the name and the age is because name is our first identity as human beings. When you’re born, you’re given the name and that’s our first identity. So in a way, I am giving this identity back to the people who have been part of that collateral damage and who no longer exist.”

— Ambreen Butt

Gallery Wendi Norris presents Say My Name, a solo exhibition of new collage works by Ambreen Butt.  Say My Name is Butt’s first exhibition with Gallery Wendi Norris and her first in San Francisco. 

Created as a means to explore the relationship between power and vulnerability and to pay homage to innocent lives lost, each of the twelve pieces in Say My Name incorporates the name and age of a single Afghan or Pakistani child killed in U.S. drone strikes.  Butt commences by staining the paper in tea. She then separately and repeatedly writes or prints out the child’s name, shreds it into pieces, and arranges and glues the shredded fragments to her tea-stained paper in dense, swirling patterns. This process, undertaken with repetitive and transformational urgency, reconsiders the ripping, tearing action of a drone strike in order to elevate the names of its victims into shapes of exquisite grace and enduring strength.