The Exception and the Rule: Karen Mirzah and Brad Butler

Brad Butler in Attendance

The artistic practice of UK film/video artists Karen Mirza and Brad Butler challenges and interrogates participation, collaboration, the social turn, and the traditional roles of artist as producer and audience as recipient. This investigation currently takes the form of The Museum of Non Participation, a cross-cultural artistic intervention and appraisal of standard forms of representing and experiencing the everyday, in Karachi and London. The project was conceived in 2007 when Mirza and Butler witnessed the protests of the Pakistani lawyers’ movement and subsequent state violence from a window of the National Art Gallery in Islamabad.

The Exception and the Rule is Mirza and Butler’s most recent film from this ongoing series. Conscious of their outside perceptions of the city and its geo-political weight, they investigate the everyday patterns of Karachi’s inhabitants and social architecture. In a city with almost no museums, the city itself becomes the museum. Non-participation becomes a form of resistance; questioned are the choices and the consequences, within the constraints of our global economic and political systems, of participation/implication, action/inaction, and resistance/pacifism.

Earlier works Non Places, The Space Between and The Autonomous Object? provide history and context for Mirza and Butler’s commitment to questioning the objectivity of the cinematic frame and its implications in anthropology, ethnography, and architecture.

www.mirza-butler.net
www.no-w-here.org

RELATED EVENT
The Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society and DIM will co-present an artist’s talk and workshop with Brad Butler. Time and place TBA. Visit www.dimcinema.ca and www.cineworks.ca for further details.