Karen Mirza & 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 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.

The artists 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. Together, they founded the not for profit artist platform, no.w.here in 2004.  They recently received the 2009 production grant from the Museum of Contemporary Cinema Foundation Madrid, they were Festival Award winners at The 2010 Chicago Film and Video Festival and were nominated for the 2010 Transmediale Award Berlin. Their body of work, ‘The Museum of Non Participation’, commissioned by Artangel, proposes a museum as a conceptual (geo)political construct of gesture, image and thresholds of language. This ongoing body of work has since been the main feature in Kaleidoscope Magazine, the front cover of Art Monthly and the subject of ‘Future Now Greats’ in Art Review whilst their first film made in this context ‘The Exception and the Rule’ has screened in over 16 major international festivals. ‘Deep State’ and Hold Your Ground’ were both commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella in 2012.

Karen Mirza and Brad Butler exhibited at Vivid in Birmingham in late 2010 and were invited artists in residence at Townhouse Gallery in Cairo 2010/11.  In Spring 2013 they will present a major solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
They are represented by Waterside Contemporary, London and Galerie Non, Istanbul.

Image: still from ‘Deep State’, 2012 Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella.