Noor Afshan Mirza & Brad Butler: The Scar

Together we are barrelling towards the scene of the accident at 120 kilometres an hour.

Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Butler’s fiction film installation weaves together conspiracy, gangster, noir, politics, crash theory, fantasy and reality into a disrupted narrative and genre exploration that ignites a gender revolution.

Across three chapters with the same characters that all end in a car crash, The Scar tells its story from the position of the female passenger, Yenge. Through her journey, we begin to address corrupt systems that hold power, explore ways to “get out” of the car and begin to imagine an alternative society no longer dominated by patriarchy.

Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Butler’s work engages with contradictions of inequality, power, privilege and (non) participation and until recently took the form of a fictional institution: The Museum of Non-Participation (2008-2016). Their collaboration spans moving image, installation, workshops, sound, text and performed actions.

Differentiating between work made “in” struggle and work made about struggle they take up an expanded notion of how to think politics with and through the body. Mirza and Butler work in an international context and are interested in expanded notions of art that turn to such areas as state violence and forced disappearance, the ectoplasm of neoliberalism and women’s bodies as sites of resistance.

The Scar is commissioned by FLAMIN Productions through FILM LONDON Artists’ Moving Image Network with funding from Arts Council England in partnership with HOME & no.w.here with support from àngels Barcelona, Centre national des arts plastiques France, Delfina Foundation, Edith-Russ-Haus Germany, London College of Communication, Razwana Akram, Spectre Productions and University of Salford Art Collection.