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. This has recently included The autonomous object? (2009) and their recent Artangel commission The Museum of Non Particpation The Museum of non Participation
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BRAD BUTLER & KAREN MIRZA’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 (www.mirza-butler.net). Their work is engaged with challenging and interrogating concepts 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 ten years and have participated in exhibitions in leading institutions in Europe and abroad. They recently received the 2008–2009 production grant from the Museum of Contemporary Cinema Foundation Madrid and are currently nominated for the 2010 Transmediale Award Berlin. Their current work, “The Museum of Non Participation” was commissioned by Artangel, one of the UK’s
leading arts organizations.(www.artangel.org.uk).