Faiza Butt: Tenderness, Resistance, and the Politics of Art
Faiza Butt’s art is as meticulous as it is subversive. Using painstakingly detailed ink-dot techniques inspired by Persian miniature traditions, she dissects colonial legacies, gender constructs, and the vilification of Muslim men in contemporary media. Butt’s drawings, delicate, obsessive, bridge the decorative and the political, rendering images of men not as villains or heroes, but as complex, ambiguous beings.
Interview by Leila Antakly
Born to a Kashmiri migrant family in Pakistan, Butt's work is deeply informed by personal and political histories of displacement, resistance, and identity. Her practice is shaped by her training at both the National College of Arts in Lahore and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, two institutions with very different ideological traditions. Navigating those dualities has defined her journey and career as an artist.
We spoke to Faiza about her evolution from rejecting the canvas to reclaiming painting, her fascination with the male form, and why storytelling still matters in an age of image saturation.
Your work often transforms media images of Muslim men—sometimes seen as villainized or othered—into tender portraits. What first drew you to this subject matter, and what are you hoping the viewer questions when they see these works?
I grew up in a female household in Pakistan, one of five sisters, raised in a liberal family that resisted the creeping influence of Sharia ideology. My exposure to men was limited and often coded with threat or ambiguity—there were very few in my daily life. As a result, I saw men as both fascinating and dangerous.
Later, in the West, especially post-9/11, I saw Muslim men reduced to dehumanized caricatures in the media, bearded, angry, militant. That’s where this urge to reframe the narrative came from. My portraits aren’t about heroism or villainy. I deliberately leave them ambiguous, so the viewer is forced to confront their own projections. It’s a visual trap: the softness, the eroticism, the decoration, it’s all meant to question how we read these images.
How has your exposure to different cultures shaped your aesthetic, and how do you reconcile or play with their contradictions in your practice?
Lahore’s National College of Arts was built during colonial times. It taught a hybrid curriculum, Western art with a focus on European masters, and traditional South Asian miniature painting. There, I learned how to grind pigments, make paper, and see drawing not as a preparatory stage but as an end in itself.
At Slade in London, it was the opposite. There was this valorization of large-scale, physical, often macho works. Action painting. The legacy of Pollock. And frankly, I couldn’t see myself in it. The tutors didn’t relate to my experience. I felt pressured to abandon my roots and assimilate. So, I rejected the canvas, oil paints, and embraced what I knew: drawing with ink, mark-making that took time, care, and labor, an alternative way of being in the studio, in the world.
There’s a duality in your work, from your dot technique contrasted with the political weight of your subjects. What role does repetition play in your storytelling?
Repetition is sacred to me. It’s devotional. In many traditions—Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist—repetition is a way to transcend the mundane. In my work, it’s also a feminist gesture. The time-consuming act of dotting echoes domestic crafts—embroidery, crochet, the things my mother did in our home in Pakistan. They weren’t considered “art,” but they carried culture, history, resilience.
Narrative is everything. I think hard before I make something. The image must carry weight. I want to create work that speaks in a public realm, that isn’t isolating, that offers multiple layers—aesthetic, emotional, political.
You've spoken before about rejecting traditional painting at the Slade because of its ties to Western male dominance in art. How did that decision impact the direction of your work, and do you still feel the pressure to prove the value of "soft" or "feminine" practices in the art world today?
Absolutely. I still feel the hierarchy. Even now, when people see erotic drawings of two men, they often assume it’s made by a male artist. There’s still an assumption that women don’t—or shouldn’t—occupy space in certain ways. But I’ve learned not to make art from a place of anger. I support feminist movements, but I’m also trying to move beyond gender—toward a humanistic art, where softness is strength.
During COVID, when galleries and museums shut down, I realized how much I had taken painting for granted. Painting was my first creative impulse—my earliest memory as an artist—and my parents encouraged it, giving me whatever materials I needed. But over time, my path shifted. I became immersed in the cultural politics and activism of East meets West, and somewhere along the way, I lost touch with the original spark that led me to art.
When the National Gallery finally reopened, I wandered into the landscape section and found myself in the Dutch Golden Age rooms. It was a quiet, revelatory moment. Those still lifes, portraits, and humble scenes of everyday life glowed from within. This was the period when painting became democratic freed from its earlier obligation to depict the divine. Viewing in flesh paintings by Vermeer and Brueghel their works vibrated with something more than just science: mystery, light, intimacy. Standing there, I remembered why I wanted to be an artist in the first place. That moment gave me permission to return to painting.
Activism takes many forms. Quiet, loud, symbolic, disruptive. In this current moment of political polarization and image saturation, what does activism through art look like to you?
We’re drowning in images, scrolling, consuming. And yet, people are still drawn to what’s handmade, what’s slow. That gives me hope. I think in this AI-driven age, the human creative act will become more valuable, not less. Artists have a responsibility. We’re the storytellers. We preserve nuance in a world addicted to binaries.
My activism isn’t loud or didactic. It’s in the details. In reclaiming the decorative. In honoring crafts that colonial systems dismissed as inferior. I believe art can be small and still powerful.
What stories from your upbringing do you carry into your art today, and how have those roots shaped your voice as a visual storyteller?
I didn’t grow up going to galleries or seeing “fine art.” But I was surrounded by culture—embroidery, popular posters, street art, miniature paintings, Islamic calligraphy. My mother’s crochet. Our stories weren’t in museums, but inspiration was all around me.
As Elif Shafak says, storytelling can break stereotypes and build bridges. I’m interested in singular experiences that open up into plurality. That’s how I see my practice, plural, layered, rooted in the personal, but reaching toward the universal.
What’s next for you?
I want to keep pushing. It’s easy as an artist to get boxed in, to repeat what your collectors love. But I want to evolve. I’m working with 3D materials, with light boxes and with text. But painting and drawing still give me immense joy. I’m also thinking more about public space.
Ultimately, I hold onto what I bring to the table. My lens as a Southeast Asian, feminist, Muslim artist in the West. My stories. My contradictions. My voice.
Courtesy of the artist.
Behind the Forever Beautiful, courtesy of the artist.
