Artist Statement

About Brad and Noor

Known for their Film and video practice and exhibition making, Brad and Noor have been co-directing award-winning artists Film and Video works for 23 years. Their awards and commissions include nomination for the Film London Jarman Award in 2012, The Artes Mundi Award 2015, and they were winners of Artist Film International 2015 and the Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual artists 2015. Their work has been commissioned by Artangel, the Hayward gallery, The Sydney Biennale, Film London, Film and Video Umbrella, the Serpentine Gallery and The Walker Arts Centre.  Brad and Noor are currently working on mainstream features.

Recent Work

Noorafshan & Brad launched Ruptures at London Film Festival (2019). This work is a cinema adaptation of their most 5 screen installation work The Scar (2018) on State enforced disappearance  
 

Exhibitions and video works.
Between 2008 and 2016 Noor and Brad’s art practice was framed as a  fictional institution. This ‘Museum of Non Participation’ sought to  confront (non) participation as a neoliberal condition and a threshold—  between forms of resistance and forces of oppression.
 

As part of the Museum of non Participation, Noor and Brad made multiple works that they called  ‘Acts’ including  Deep State (2012) - a science fiction-inflected protest  "training film”,  Hold Your Ground (2011) a video conceived as a form of  protest in Canary Wharf Tube Station and the installation The  Unreliable Narrator (2014) on political intimacy, terrorism and the  condition of permanent emergency.
 

Socially Engaged Practice
Launched with Artangel Interaction, The Museum of non Participation  situated itself as a museum without walls, inspired by its founders  experiences moving between their home in Bethnal Green and the city of  Karachi in Pakistan from 2007-2009. The resulting ‘socially engaged  practice’ from 2007-2016 included interventions, newspapers, wall  chalking, reading groups, language exchange, performance lectures,  audioworks, walks, political theatre, and Speech Acts. The Museum  launched in London in a space behind a barbers shop on Bethnal Green  Road where Butler and Mirza hosted a space for language exchange between  Urdu and English Speakers. A newspaper collecting a multitude voices on  this project was published as a supplement in collaboration with one of  Pakistan's largest media grouos: the Daily Jang. The Museum culminated  in 2016 in a solo exhibition at the Sydney Biennale: ‘The Embassy of  non Participation.
 

no.w.here
Prior to 2008 works by Noor and Brad included structural films and  expanded cinema works including: Non Places (1999), Where a straight  line meets a curve (2003) and the Space Between (2005). From 1998-2018  Brad and Noor  were co-director's of the artist film lab no.w.here through which they  ran hundreds of workshops and film screenings. no.w.here re-invigorated  the analogue film equipment formerly from London Filmmakers  Co-operative and The Lux Centre re-establishing and making available  16mm and super 8 equipment, training, processing and film techniques in a  building in Bethnal Green. Longer term research projects supported the  space including The Free Cinema School and Implicated Theatre created  with the Serpentine Galleries Center for Possible Studies, Experimenta  Indian Film Festival in Mumbai, the Cinema of Prayoga at the Tate  Modern, the no.w.here summer school, the Measures Lecture Series and the  Artist Film Publication: Sequence. In 2018 no.w.here was handed to a younger generation who are running a POC workers co-operative: not/nowhere.
 

Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Butler are represented by PiARTWORKS