Non Places, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, 1999

no.w.here is a unique space in London combining film production alongside critical dialogue about contemporary image making. As an artist run organisation no.w.here has supported the production of hundreds of artist works, run multiple workshops and critical discussions and actively curated performances, screenings, residencies, publications, events and exhibitions.

You work as artists, as curators, but also as creative cultural entrepreneurs. What do you call describe the other stuff you do, the stuff that isn’t being artists or curators?

Brad Butler: We just call it no.w.here…!

Karen Mirza:  I’ve been thinking about it recently as ‘the artist as…’. So, as researcher, as facilitator, as curator, as producer. It reflects the notion that practice has shifted. For example some curators now describe themselves as a curator/writer/artist. I am interested in roles and definitions not being fixed categories.

Do you think that’s understood, by a wider audience? People might need it explained?

Brad: People encounter our practice in very different ways, but some people do only see us as facilitators. It’s a big jump for some to recognise that no.w.here is an artists’ platform, that we make work ourselves, and that no.w.here addresses the complications and ideas that come out of our own practice.

One of the rare things about no.w.here is that it’s an artists’ platform with production facilities. But over time we’ve established our own body of work outside of no.w.here. In fact, right now is the first time I’ve been personally really happy with the balance in the perception between our own work and no.w.here, at least in the UK.  Outside of the UK it’s no problem – we’ve been working outside of the UK much more in the last three or four years. Really putting our energy out there, because our experience of being abroad is that people are generally more open to be able to allow you to be the sum of your parts.

Karen: Or to read the shifting register that we propose. They don’t put us in a box so easily.  That’s what I meant about is it understood, that desire by others to categorise what you are and what you do.

You started working together as artists before you started doing the other things. How did you happen to come to work together – because you come from different disciplines, don’t you?

Karen: We met as students at the Royal College of Art. We were both working with film or moving image, but in completely different ways and in different departments.

Brad was making documentaries in the Film Department, and I was in Communication Art and Design. I was in an inter-disciplinary space, I’d come from painting in Camberwell, where I didn’t quite fit, and ended up at the Royal College doing my masters.

We met, and made our first film, Asylum. Brad’s brief had been to make an arts documentary, and he took a slightly different approach, inviting an artist, me, to collaborate with him. So we made a piece of work that didn’t take straight roles of the artist as the subject and the filmmaker as the documentarian – it was quite a controversial piece.

And how your dialogue develop. Did you find that you had different critical languages?

Brad: One of the things we realised was that we’d often use very different ways to get to the same point.  And that became interesting, especially in the way we described things.  Though we never thought this would end up becoming a production space, not back then.  no.w.here was – and is – an idea to do with articulations around practice and the overlaps and the layers and the confluences. The conflicts and negotiations between our different ways of making work.

no.w.here has always been a discussion between Karen and myself about what it means to make work ‘now’, at this point. And part of this has always been an interest in language, an investment in language. Whether you take that as cinematic language or the limits of language or text as image…

Karen: In my painting I was interested in investigating the image, and in questions around representation. Brad was coming from anthropology and documentary. So there was a strong connection where our relationship to the moving image was coming from non-fiction – we weren’t working with theatrical models of cinema or narrative.

Questions of representation are fundamental to both painting and documentary factors – was that a key thing?

Karen: Yes. And being at college and being exposed to a lot of avant-garde film practice was a real eye opener. You could think about film and image in time, in an exciting way.

And is that where your championing of both historic and contemporary avant-garde film practice started? Were you looking to situate your practice in some kind of context?

Karen: Not really, that was more a part of the artistic process. When I make work there are films and texts that are part of the thinking. We’re both avid readers, so there’s always theory and critical texts around our discussions. But also, there are always things that happen in the everyday. An observation, an experience or an encounter.

And all those things go in to making the work. When we were making Asylum there were already ideas we knew we couldn’t contain within that work, they spill out. Whenever we’re making a work, we’re always seeding the next work, so half way through making Asylum we’d already come up to the observation of what became the next film, which was Non-Places.

The way I think about no.w.here and our own practice is as a set of dialogues that happen around our interests that are working their way through into new work. And then there are larger dialogues which are not right to put into our personal work but which are an influence, and no.w.here as a framework reflects them both. We develop discussions and see if other people are interested in them also.  This creates the facilitation, the exhibition of other work, the showcasing of work.

It’s striking, in both your art practice and the other things you do, that it’s an engagement and dialogue with historic avant-garde, but that your work doesn’t simply emulate that interest in material.

Brad: On the issue of materiality and the historical avant-garde, one thing that has occurred to me is how as a society we quickly leap onto the newest thing. But for me when we talk about an historic avant-garde, well, I consider these people to also be peers and it’s very exciting to be in dialogue with them. This is a dialogue with people who are forever embedded in the apparatus… for example when artists first picked up the cine camera. I don’t think these attitudes should be silenced because history or technology looks forward.

I think we’re agreeing..! There is historical practice, but having a dialogue with that practice isn’t the same thing as simply perpetuating a kind of rulebook for the avant-garde. In your own work, you might break a lot of those rules for example, in that it’s always interested in something in addition to the formal and materialist – in that, while it isn’t representational, it’s questioning representation. But how does that work?

But how do you make avant-garde films that are also of the broader political culture? I think this is a roundabout way of asking you if you’re political artists.

Karen: Well, yes. Though I’d qualify that in that politics is a much more explicit interest in our current work. The earlier work gathered significant support but in very marginal places – the kind of classical spaces of avant-garde practice. Certain film festivals, certain curators. But otherwise, its politics were mostly overlooked and we were mistakenly branded materialists.

I do consider that this work was always political. In 1999 we made Non Places on 16mm black and white film, as a site of resistance to the emerging digital wave and the arguments about technological determinism. It was made for cinema and the gallery. It can be read as a linear fifteen minutes beginning, middle and end film, but it also has meaning if you enter and exit at any point. It has an internal logic that doesn’t compromise either format – cinematic or gallery.

These are the kind of debates that were happening around film and video at that time, and this was a work that was clearly addressing those. And it was also screened and ‘performed’ – as was always the intention – in one of the filmed locations, the underpasses of Marble Arch in the West End. The intervention into public space; the relationship of media into public space, to public art, is another highly politicised space of intervention. Who has rights to public space? What’s the relationship of private and public space? These negotiations interested us in making this kind of event, including the reading of this work by different viewers – joggers, tourists, workers, homeless people, the police, the art audience – that congregated on that evening.

Brad: A key thread that runs through no.w.here implicitly, and now is in our work explicitly, is the question: How does one resist? A difficult question considering the many complexities of the ‘political’. We’re quite explicit about this in our new work The Museum of Non Participation which is the way we are personally addressing this question, whereas no.w.here proposes a relationship between art and film and looks to reflect back what’s happening in society more generally, because it’s about contemporary practice. But now in our practice we are also explicitly saying, “This is a big question for us.”

So how has your work changed from Non Places – what are the changes in your approach to making work?

Karen: For me this started when we were invited to do a project, to collaborate with another filmmaker and curator in India, on the Experimenta film festival. This was about constructing an independent film platform inside India across different regions, filmic histories, and cultural languages.

Experimenta was partly about bringing classical North American and European avant-garde works to India – some of the works that even Indian intellectuals and academics had only read about, and showing them alongside new film and video work from India. That was a five -ear collaboration with Shai Heredia – travelling, thinking, working and living – and gradually shifting our own working practice, context and ideas to embrace other modernisms than the Western, North American and European frameworks.

And that fed back into your own work?

Karen:  Yes, absolutely. Our research, no.w.here, the work that you’re seeing from us now, the conversations we’re having on issues from Afghansitan, Pakistan, the Middle East to local politics. These are explorations that we are involved with, like you would if you were painting or drawing, we’re sketching a new context.

Brad: But also, when thinking about all of these activities, there was also the timing of things. Locally in 2000 the The Lux Centre collapsed, which was a big problem for us.  And globally, the shift in geopolitics was emphatic…

So what happened? You were working as artists. You had a curatorial practice. What’s the step to what no.w.here became?

Karen: You’re referring to our original 291 screenings. There was such an energy around showing that work at that time, we carved out a space and invited other artists. It was like doing a club night, but for avant-garde film, contemporary and historical work.

This happened because The Lux Centre closed the month that we started dong the screenings – we’d already been planning to do these because we were thinking there’s a dialogue about saving the collection, but there’s not a dialogue about production. So I think people gathered around the 291 screenings as an energy around ‘practice’.

And then naturally whilst we were showing the work we started to think, “How does work get made now?” So it was a very organic kind of set of conclusions whilst simultaneously we were going to these meetings about saving the Lux collection. There was a sense of real support and lobbying for what was going on for the sector.

Brad: It became about necessity. If the work isn’t being shown, you show the work.  If you haven’t got a space to make the work, you create the space. If the equipment is about to be thrown out, pick it up and put it back together. So it started off in Karen’s studio – and the equipment most in demand at that point was an optical printer…

Karen: … it was the most portable and wasn’t in disrepair. Things like the rostrum camera were in multiple pieces. So the optical printer was at least one portable object that could be taken out of the lock up, put into a dark room and we said “you can use it now.”

Brad: But I think the vision was the critical bit, because we were told by the Arts Council very squarely that a co-operative structure was not going to be acceptable. And we had already worked out that it’s not enough just to have the equipment. You have to create a dialogue around using the equipment and you have to show work. So you have a cycle of production, education, distribution and dialogue, critical dialogue.

So you came from being artists and having facilitated curatorial debate and discussion, and then production adds to that activity. I think that’s very different than if you start from offering the means of production.

Karen:  Yes – I think we had the questions of why? Why analogue film, in 2004. And you have to address that contextually. You couldn’t put the production equipment back into use without actually questioning its situation. And as much as we have been accused of being fetishists or materialists, well, that was the furthest from our mind. We’re not in love with the 19th century! It’s about having this broad range of ways to make an image, and continuing to have those options. It is about maintaining critical relationships towards image making per se.

And is it practice-led demand? Artists wanting to work with that material?

Karen: At that particular point, there weren’t that many really. At that time, I’d met Guy Sherwin through showing work and he basically pushed me forward when there was talk in the old Lux about getting rid of film saying, “This is a young person who’s interested in film.” I wasn’t the only one, but a lot of the film had already been run down – if you went to do an optical printing workshop you’d turn up, pay your £50, and half the kit wasn’t working.

Brad: And as a technology dies artists often pick it up at that point. The flame burns brightest at the end! And the digital is an inevitable wave, a tsunami for analogue. And it’s really important to think about film not just as a material but also its thinking processes and its apparatus, the hierarchies and the heritage and the future. But again we were not interested in fighting for an analogue technology. We set up no.w.here in response to philosophical questions.

And pragmatically, digital as a production method didn’t need that kind of support.

Brad:  Yes, and it’s interesting that everyone can now make films in their bedrooms if they like or their studios. The whole sense of working around the co-operative, and the collaborative, is different now and no.w.here addresses that tension.

In your curatorial practice and in your film practice, those debates are often about celluloid as a material, but I’d say they’re not bound by that. You work with film, but it’s ideas and place and things that take priority – or at least that’s what’s prioritised in the way I respond to the work. Even with Non Places – it’s about public space, it’s about how individuals function, there’s a subject there that’s not just the material.

Karen:  I was listening to a discussion recently about operating within the real and the symbolic. Non Places, for me, is also a film about film. It’s about film and cinema as a non-place.  So the site of the auditorium, that space of exchange or contract – you enter and see a film – is a non place. Not a destination and not an arrival point. It’s this imminent space.

And then, also, it is actually physically about place, the film documents and marks London in 1999. And also the relationship to place, ideas about how we live our lives. So a politics of time, because to stop in transit and to be present, is in itself an act of thinking about the politics of time.

Brad:  There’s a saying that the first image of the film is the most important. And every image after that is an attempt to explain that first image. That you can read everything from there in a way. Recently Karen and I were standing in the National Art Gallery in Islamabad, standing in a room full of paintings – paintings of nudes in Islamic society, a problematic space. From there we looked through the window at the lawyers being beaten by police in front of the High Commission in Pakistan, a violent end to a peaceful protest. This experience has now become a metaphor for our interests, an image we are trying to unravel, the idea of being within a contested space and looking out at another contested space and encountering one’s own relationship between art and politics, politics and aesthetics. Where the room is the camera and the window is the lens, and we stand inside the apparatus… what does the window mean? Because, of course, there are different kinds of windows…

I think that’s exactly the difference between Non Places and the work you’re making now in that it’s the apparatus but actually you’re using apparatus as a conceptual tool to discuss that much broader apparatus. And you’re engaging, you’re engaging with the world.  Where Non Places situated itself in the world, The Exception and the Rule is in dialogue with places, with people…

Brad: Perhaps we can think about this as a condition of modernism. That we all share conditions of modernity with each other. One of the implications of this is that we are all living within local and global relationships, forming relationships with countries and cultures we may never visit geographically. This is a kind of very modern anthropology for me, the idea that I can have a media relationship with Pakistan (for example) and yet I may not make time to know my neighbour living next door.

Karen: And that’s partly because of our relationship to images. Image production, circulation, distribution…

Is it the difference between commentary and engagement?

Brad: An implication that we are living through and by the image.

Karen: It’s very rewarding to be able to work across these different platforms as in a sense the Museum of Non Participation as a project and an artwork also incorporates some of no.w.here’s methods and strategies. A constructive exchange between research, facilitation, private and public conversations, film and art.