Current press release text
Karen Mirza and Brad Butler's artistic practice is based on collaboration and dialogue. This manifests itself in a multi-layered practice of filmmaking, drawing, installation, photography, performance, publishing and curating. Their work is engaged with challenging and interrogating terms such as participation, collaboration, the social turn and the traditional roles of the artist as producer and the audience as recipient. www.no-w-here.org.uk. Karen Mirza and Brad Butler have been actively involved in the London art scene for over thirteen years and have participated in many exhibitions in leading institutions in Europe and abroad. They recently received the 2009 production grant from the Museum of Contemporary Cinema Foundation Madrid, they were Festival Award winners at The 2010 Chicago Film and Video Festival and were nominated for the 2010 Transmediale Award Berlin. Their current body of work, The Museum of Non Participation, commissioned by Artangel, proposes a museum as a conceptual (geo)political construct of gesture, image and thresholds of language. This ongoing body of work has since been the main feature in Kaleidoscope Magazine, the front cover of Art Monthly and the subject of Future Now Greats in Art Review whilst their first film made in this context The Exception and the Rule has screened in over 16 major international festivals. Karen Mirza and Brad Butler's forthcoming work opens at Vivid in Birmingham on 3rd November 2010 and they are invited artists in residence at Townhouse Gallery in Cairo 2010/11.
Website Background:
Early works often emerged from their interest in seminal avant-garde film. Non Places (1999), for example, is a contemporary take on the constructivist films of the 1920s and in Where a Straight Line Meets a Curve (2003) the artists drew inspiration from the use of resonant frequencies from Alvin Lucier’s 'I am Sitting in a Room' (1970). Mirza / Butler often take a single visual observation as a point of departure, such as the space between tower blocks in The Space Between (2005), the gesture of performing a 360 degree walking rotation with a camera in Structural Constellation (2006) or the cinematic principles inherent in photo realist painting in The Glass Stare (2006). From these initial images, Mirza and Butler intertwine a range of visual and conceptual languages, combining analytical and experimental sequences to create open-ended works. This includes The autonomous object? (2009) The Museum of non Participation and The Exception and the Rule
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