We are delighted to welcome Karen Mirza in the next session of our Fine Art Visiting Artist Talks at the School of Music and Fine Art.

Thursday 6th February, 2014  6-8pm
BridgeWardens College Lecture Theatre
Open to: All Students and Staff.

Karen Mirza is a key figure in artist film and video, known both for her work and her curatorial practice. Her practice started within a background in painting from Camberwell College of Art and continued through her MA in film and video at the Royal college of Art. After graduating from the RCA in 1997 she has created site specific and site conditioned works for galleries, public spaces and the cinema that foreground the sculptural qualities of projection and the architectonics of film and video. Karen is currently working on solo and collaborative work that utilises printmaking, photography and film to explore themes of ‘the imagination and the everyday’, ‘the psychoanalytical and the political’.

Karen has collaborated with Brad Butler since 1998, developing a layered practice which consists of film, installation, performance, publishing and curating. Their work challenges terms such as participation, collaboration and the traditional roles of the artist as producer and the audience as recipient.

Since 2009 Mirza and Butler have been developing a body of work entitled The Museum of Non Participation. The term “non participation” is a device for questioning and challenging current conditions of political involvement and resistance. The Museum of Non Participation embeds its institutional critique in its very title, yet it releases itself from being an actual museum. Instead it travels as a place, a slogan, a banner, a performance, a newspaper, a film, an intervention, an occupation: situations that enable this museum to “act.”

In 2004, Mirza and Butler formed no.w.here, an artist-run organization that combines film production with critical dialogue about contemporary image making. It supports the production of artist works, runs workshops and critical discussions and actively curates performances, screenings, residencies, publications, events and exhibitions.

Mirza and Butler are shortlisted for the sixth Artes Mundi Prize. The UK’s biggest contemporary art prize

http://www.mirza-butler.net/
http://waterside-contemporary.com/artists/mirza-butler/
http://www.artesmundi.org/pr/new-director-of-artes-mundi-reveals-shortlist-for-the-uks-biggest-contemporary-art-prize

View our Visting Artist Talks web page