About Karen Mirza and Brad Butler

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 fully 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 recipients. Currently this is taking the form of a project they have initiated called: ‘The Museum of Non Participation’. Research is an integral part of their artistic practice, they approach their work from a conceptual slant engaged in universal ideas about modernity, the experiential city, the city as a site of alienation / creativity, playground / battleground. Their film and video installations question the filmic, sculptural and architectonic qualities of the moving image. The presentation of their work feeds back into the space of display, often utilising sculptural structures. Moving across the conventions of film, cinema, sculpture and architecture their practice is concerned with ideas of uncertainty in relation to temporality, ephemerality, and repetition that proliferates the everyday, reaffirmed in an urban context whereby the breakdown of control mechanisms and the reproduction of fear is played out in lived social space. ‘Non Places’ and ‘Where a straight Line meets a Curve’ are examples of works that explore the conflict and tension between the real ‘actual’ space and the imaginary ‘virtual’ place as experienced in the mediatised everyday. Mirza and Butler intertwine a range of visual and conceptual languages, combining analytical and experimental sequences to create open-ended works.

Karen Mirza and Brad Butler have been actively involved in the London art scene as well as participating in exhibitions of leading institutions in Europe and Abroad. Their work has not only been received by well known art institutions (Serpentine Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, among others) and biennials (such as Architecture and Film Biennale Graz ) but also from important film festivals such as Werkleitz Film festival in Germany. They have been taking residencies and engaging with different socio-political contexts.