Ambreen Butt: I Bear Witness | March 26 - May 9, 2026

Gallery Wendi Norris proudly presents "I Bear Witness," its third solo exhibition with Ambreen Butt (b. 1969, Lahore, Pakistan). The exhibition features a series of eight new works that mark the culmination of a trilogy she began in 2015, through which Butt has rendered visible the lives, names, and stories that acts of violence erase. This final chapter builds upon her series "Say My Name" (2015–2023), which memorialized children lost to drone warfare, and "Lay Bare My Arms" (2023), which interrogated American gun culture.

Throughout the series, Butt casts the maternal figure as both subject and witness, an active vessel of testimony rather than a passive symbol of loss. Drawing on religious and cultural traditions that cast the maternal body as a bearer of memory—particularly the icon of the Madonna and Child—Butt positions witnessing as an act of holding and carrying forward fragments of grief, displacement, and care. In works such as "Awladi (My Children)" (2026) and "Awladna (Our Children)" (2026), maternal figures confront the viewer directly, their bodies delineated through repetition, framing, and the collaged text of a poem. In "Silence!" (2026), the figure, deftly rendered in urgent red threadwork, cries out, her call reverberating across the surface as a sweeping field of florals disperses outward.

Across the series, body and ground become inseparable, each absorbing and carrying the traces of what has been endured. The land—figured here as the ultimate manifestation of the maternal—functions in this series not only as material but as collaborator and witness. Butt cultivates walking irises from her own garden, which reappear throughout the series as meditations on ephemerality and resilience. The keffiyeh, integrated into each composition, extends its history of protection and resistance into a woven emblem of memory and endurance.

“To witness without the power to intervene is an act of endurance; this endurance in itself is a form of resistance,” says Butt.