Noorafshan Mirza and
Brad Butler

The Scar

From September 11 to October 31, 2020

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Evolving over three chapters, The Scar delineates a narrative of parallel temporalities, channeling real events involving the deep state and the suppression of dissent. Imagining post-patriarchal futurities through a flux of aesthetic registers and cinematic tropes from film noir to gangster film, political realities are made palpable by fiction and the surreal. The recurring presence of a “resistant dead” is thick and disruptive. Disappearance emboldens resistance: “She did not die, she multiplied.”

The Scar follows Yenge, a beauty queen protagonist. Chapter 1 - The State of the State, finds her sitting docile in a car speeding along the highway at night, amongst the Chief of Police, a Politician and a State Assassin. Silent yet critical, she endures their misogyny. By Chapter 2 - The Mouth of the Shark, her voice overrides and interrupts the same scene, marking her shift towards rebellion and self-determination. In Chapter 3 - The Gossip, Yenge arrives in a netherworld where discussion amongst women is a form of activism empowered by linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical differences.

Based between London and Istanbul, Noorafshan Mirza and Brad Butler have been working collaboratively for over 20 years. From 2008 to 2016 their practice was framed as a fictive institution called The Museum of Non Participation. Through multiple works conceived of as acts, they confront (non) participation as a neoliberal condition and a threshold between forms of resistance and forces of oppression. They were shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award (2012) and the Artes Mundi 6 Prize (2015), and they were the winners of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Artists (2015). In 2015, they were selected by the Whitechapel Gallery in the context of the Artists’ Film International programme. They have been commissioned by Artangel, the Hayward Gallery, the Biennale of Sydney, Film London, Film and Video Umbrella, the Serpentine Galleries, and the Walker Art Center. The Scar has been presented at the Delfina Foundation and HOME Manchester. RUPTURES, their most recent film premiered at the 2019 BFI London Film Festival.