Karen Mirza and Brad Butler make film and video installations that question the filmic, sculptural and architectonic qualities of the moving image. Mirza / Butler install their films in architectural configurations, frequently presenting them across two or three screens, the questions of past and presence, framing and projection are interrogated and expanded notions of these are proposed. Their work aims to blur the distinction between film and sculpture, art and cinema.
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). In more recent work, 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 beguilingly open-ended works. In their forthcoming work, The autonomous object? (2009), Mirza / Butler are working with performances by passersby in a series of interrelated mise-en-scènes that reflect issues of subjectivity and authorship.
Karen Mirza and Brad Butler live and work in London and have had a collaborative practice for 10 years. They have exhibited in many group exhibitions, recent shows include ‘Evolution’ Leeds City Art Gallery, ‘The Expanded Eye’ Kunsthaus Zurich, ‘New Work UK’ Whitechapel Gallery, Architecture and Film Biennale Graz, ‘Vertical and Horizontal’ Serpentine Pavilion and ‘A Certain Tendency in Representation’ at Thomas Dane gallery.