Dhee Kahani

Dhee Kahani is a large-scale installation artwork by contemporary artist Hira Butt, presenting a grandiose display of meters of interlinked chains made from golden bangles and red decorative fabric. Bangles are a form of jewelry that quietly become part of South Asian women’s lives, serving as vessels of personal expression and cultural identity. Often worn for most of a woman’s life, they carry emotional, social, and generational significance. The red decorative fabric, typically used in South Asian bridal dresses, evokes rituals of marriage, tradition, and celebration.

Through this installation, Butt explores the layered complexities of South Asian cultural traditions and the inherited expectations placed upon women. The work reflects on how ancestral ideals of being an “exemplary woman” are passed down through generations, shaping relationships and, at times, enabling emotional and social exploitation. By magnifying these materials into an immersive installation, Dhee Kahani transforms intimate objects into a collective narrative.

The artwork centres on golden bangles that are traditionally gifted to Pakistani women on their wedding day as symbols of trust, value, and commitment. While these bangles are often perceived as unassuming, Butt views them as deeply embedded within South Asian women’s personal and domestic lives. By reworking and recontextualising the bangles, the artist alters their function and meaning, opening space to examine shifting narratives around marriage, womanhood, and cultural obligation.

Dhee Kahani raises critical questions about the promises associated with the wedding day and the life that is culturally envisioned to follow — a life that may not always materialise. Situated within contemporary South Asian feminist art practices, the installation invites reflection on femininity, inheritance, and the lived realities of women navigating tradition, identity, and expectation.