Karen Mirza/Brad Butler

Museum of Non Participation
October 10-19 2012

* This exhibition is not open during the day. It is only viewable during scheduled events.

WED OCT 10 / 8PM
What Will The Next Revolution Look Like? (Performance)
with Raymond Boisjoly, Coupe L’etat, Sebnem Ozpeta, Emilio Rojas and Jeremy Todd
A generative performance that tells the story of the Museum’s emergence. Mirza/Butler will stage a conversation between their experiences in London, Karachi, Mumbai and Cairo, and VIVO’s community and our experiences in Vancouver. The performance creates an agora–a space to raise such questions as: What position do you take? When do you participate and when do you abstain? What is your stake in artist-run culture? Are you running your culture? Is it a culture or a museum?

FRI OCT 12 / 9PM

VIDEO BAR: A Share of the Lead
Programmed by Robert Pederson
Cocktail and juice bar by Ship’s Whistle
Room decor by Tent Shop’s Jacob Gleeson
Live Sarod/Sitar performance by Jeff Chute
Daniel Presnell

WED OCT 17 / 7PM
No Reading After the Internet: Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975)
Aesthetics of Resistance is a historical novel that dramatizes anti-fascist resistance and the rise and fall of proletarian political parties in Europe between 1930 and WWII. Living in Berlin in 1937, the unnamed narrator and his peers, sixteen and seventeen-year-old working-class students, seek ways to express their hatred for the Nazi regime. They meet in museums and galleries, and in their discussions they explore the affinity between political resistance and art, the connection at the heart of Weiss’s novel. Weiss suggests that meaning lies in the refusal to renounce resistance, no matter how intense the oppression, and that it is in art that new models of political action and social understanding are to be found. The novel includes extended meditations on paintings, sculpture, and literature. Moving from the Berlin underground to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War and on to other parts of Europe, the story teems with characters, almost all of whom are based on historical figures.

FRI OCT 19 / 8PM
Deep State. 45 Mins, HD, 2012. UK
Deep State (2012) is a film by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler that has been scripted in collaboration with author China Miéville. The film takes its title from the Turkish term ‘Derin Devlet’, meaning ‘state within the state’. Although its existence is impossible to verify, this shadowy nexus of special interests and covert relationships is the place where real power is said to reside, and where fundamental decisions are made – decisions that often run counter to the outward impression of democracy.

Amorphous and unseen, the influence of this deep state is glimpsed at regular points throughout the film – most clearly surfacing in its reflexive responses to popular protest, and in legislated acts of violence and containment, but also rumbling and reverberating, deeper down, in an eternally recurring call-and-response between rhetorical positions and counter-languages, in which a raised fist, a thrown rock, a crowd surge, an occupation provoke a corresponding reaction in the form of a police charge, a baton attack, a pepper spray, assassinations.

A powerful undertow in the ongoing tide of history, this push and pull of competing forces is deftly illuminated in a vivid montage of newly filmed and archive footage. Collided together, past, present and future trace a continuum, in which the same repetitive patterns are played out. Against a backdrop of momentous, historically resonant demonstrations, an eternal rioter, or ‘riotonaut’, is picked out, as if by a searchlight, ever-present at each and every flashpoint. On a moonscape, confronted with a picket that becomes a riot, an ur-dictator, personification of the ‘Deep State’, blurts stupefying, hot-air abstractions of neo-liberalism.

‘Deep State’ is commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. Funded by Arts Council England and London Councils.

Amorphous and unseen, the influence of this deep state is glimpsed at regular points throughout the film – most clearly surfacing in its reflexive responses to popular protest, and in legislated acts of violence and containment, but also rumbling and reverberating, deeper down, in an eternally recurring call-and-response between rhetorical positions and counter-languages, in which a raised fist, a thrown rock, a crowd surge, an occupation provoke a corresponding reaction in the form of a police charge, a baton attack, a pepper spray, assassinations.

A powerful undertow in the ongoing tide of history, this push and pull of competing forces is deftly illuminated in a vivid montage of newly filmed and archive footage. Collided together, past, present and future trace a continuum, in which the same repetitive patterns are played out. Against a backdrop of momentous, historically resonant demonstrations, an eternal rioter, or ‘riotonaut’, is picked out, as if by a searchlight, ever-present at each and every flashpoint. On a moonscape, confronted with a picket that becomes a riot, an ur-dictator, personification of the ‘Deep State’, blurts stupefying, hot-air abstractions of neo-liberalism.

Co-Presented by Institutions by Artists / The Convention
Organized by PAARC, Fillip and ARCA
October 12-14 2012

SUN OCT 14 / 2PM – FOR REGISTERED CONVENTION ATTENDEES ONLY
EREHWON / NOWHERE Panel: Bastien Gilbert, Virginija Januškevičiūtė (Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt) Karen Mirza and Brad Butler (Museum of Non-Participation), Claire Tancons and Christopher Cozier (Alice Yard)

Dear VIVO,

In October 2012, we will temporarily transform VIVO Media Arts Centre into the Museum of Non Participation in order to interrogate the historic and future imagination of both spaces. Within the context of VIVO, and in relation to the Institutions by Artists conference, we will address the future of artist-run initiatives, pedagogical practices and the social life of such organisations through a concrete questioning of the ‘non’. Akin to the dots in no.w.here, the lab we have sustained and run since 2004, the ‘Non’ in the Museum of Non Participation disrupts familiar notions of place, institution and participation. Contrary to the belief that the Museum is countering participatory or socially engaged practices, it is important to emphasise that the components of this statement are mutable–that the ‘Non’ needs to be placed in proximity to Museum as well as Participation. The Museum of Non Participation stands as a malleable, shifting threshold that contains different register, tools and tactics.

The Museum has a story that we tell about its origins. It was conceived of in 2007 during a visit to the newly opened National Gallery of Art in Islamabad. As we stood inside the controversial gallery of nude paintings, we witnessed the large-scale protests of the Lawyers Movement taking place through windows, outside the boundaries of the museum. Despite this story, the origins of the Museum are equally in London as they are in Karachi, and deeply connected to our experience working collectively during the depoliticised climate of London’s art scene in the 1990s/early 2000s. With the demise of the London Film-Makers Coop, which merged with London Video Arts to form the Lux in 2002, a vacuum around discussion about process and practice seized the culture. We initially formulated solidarity through early light readings, screenings and happenings outside of a fixed location. The formation of no.w.here allowed us to further concretise those ambitions. The emergence of the Museum of Non Participation offered us a place to speak about something we were inside of. The performance that grew out of the Museum, What will the next revolution look like? Is a generative conversation between us and our experiences in London, Karachi, Mumbai and Cairo, and VIVO’s community and their experiences in Vancouver. We are interested in how the frame of the performance creates an agora–a space to raise such questions as: What position do you take? When do you participate and when do you abstain? What is your stake in artist-run culture? Are you running your culture? Is it a culture or a museum?

We want to use this process at VIVO as a method to read each of our histories alongside our contemporary moment. The Museum will address VIVO’s legacy backwards, starting in the present and ending with its founding practice as a video exchange project and library, as a way to investigate the proximity between the culture of its inception and the current moment. We want to work with VIVO’s collective and members in order to push the performance to further resonant with the site and seek ways for VIVO’s artists to work through their own disruption of the ‘Non’ in relation to place, institution and participation.

Sincerely,
Brad Butler/ Karen Mirza

Mirza and Butler  propose the museum as a conceptual (geo)political construct of gesture, image, and thresholds of language. The Museum of Non Participation was conceived during the Pakistani Lawyers movement in Islamabad – protests Mirza and Butler witnessed through the windows of the National Art Gallery – and developed over an eighteen-month period. As part of the project, the artists have worked with street vendors, Urdu translators, architects, estate agents, housing activists, lawyers, hairdressers, filmmakers, wedding photographers, newspaper printers, artists, and writers to create spaces for dialogue and exchange. The Museum of Non Participation first appeared as an English/Urdu language class in September 2008, traveling from the Oxford House community centre in Bethnal Green to a space behind Yaseen’s Hairdressers on the Bethnal Green Road, and then to a public performance at the Guernica room in the Whitechapel Gallery. The project has variously taken the form of film, an Urdu/English language exchange, street interventions, a radio show, and performances. Mirza and Butler’s practice is based on collaboration and dialogue and 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 as well as the traditional roles of the artist as producer and the audience as recipient, positing the project as a future model for a nomadic, flexible, and adaptable “museum.” They have worked together since 1998, and in 2004 formed no.w.here, an artist-run space in London, UK for the production, discussion and dissemination of practices engaged with the moving image, politics, technology and aesthetics. (mirza-butler.net)