The Daily Battle

Karen Mirza and Brad Butler

4 – 20 November 2010

For The Daily Battle Karen Mirza and Brad Butler occupied a column space in the UK/Urdu newspaper The Daily Jang (translated back into English as The Daily Battle) as a temporary site of creative discourse about the role of art in society.

Each day of the exhibition a different cultural thinker published a text that was their own interpretation of this context. 100 copies of The Daily Jang were delivered to VIVID each morning as the focus of an installation within the exhibition. Column contributors included Nada Raza, Sara Wajid, Gemma Sharpe, Rahila Gupta, Auj Khan, Shanay Jhaveri, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler.

The exhibition included Mirza and Butler’s award-winning film The Exception and The Rule. Shot in Pakistan in 2009, the film avoids traditional documentary modes and within the context of civil unrest, incorporates performances to camera, classic observation and public interventions. The Museum of non Participation is an ongoing interest in seeking out thresholds in language and intervening in new possible sites of exhibition and (non) participation. Mirza and Butler phrase this within their practice as an exploration of the politics of translation, translation within language and a performance of the condition of the ‘untranslatable’.