The Bad Vibes Club presents The Unreliable Narrator, a film by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, with a talk by Karen Mirza.
The Unreliable Narrator by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler is a video work that revisits the 2008 Mumbai Attacks to depict the deeper battle for control over the event’s grand narratives. Enlisting an unreliable narrator the work destabilises these narratives by drawing attention to the absurd convergence of Bollywood dreams, twisted masculinities, religion, class and fear. Karen Mirza will talk about the themes of The Unreliable Narrator in the context of contemporary forms of terror and their representations in the media.
Mirza and Butler’s work spans filmmaking, installation, drawing, publishing and curating. The artists draw influence from critical moments of change, protest and debate. The Unreliable Narrator is part of a body of work entitled The Museum of Non Participation (2009-present). The term “non participation” for the duo 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.”