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. www.mirza-butler.net Their work is also 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 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, originally commissioned by Artangel Interaction, proposes a museum as a conceptual (geo)political construct of gesture, image and thresholds of language. This ongoing body of work has since featured in Kaleidoscope Magazine, the front cover of Art Monthly and the subject of Art Review's Future Now Greats whilst their first film made in this context The Exception and the Rule has screened in over 20 major international festivals. Karen Mirza and Brad Butler's forthcoming work includes a lecture performance at the Istanbul Biennale, a group show at the Arnolfini Gallery and a new film work commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. They are also invited artists in residence at ZKM in 2011.
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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