Karen Mirza and Brad Butler are London (UK)-based artists/filmmakers who have worked together since 1998. Starting in 2007, they have pursued a strain of practice entitled The Museum of Non Participation, a collaborative collection of gestures, speech acts and audio-visual work which have been created and presented in Pakistan, Egypt, Germany and the UK. The Museum of Non Participation contests the idea of the museum as a neutral or passive space for the representation of culture. It takes as its foundation, the idea that cultural production is necessarily informed by the social, political and economic circumstances of a place at a specific time.

Mirza and Butler, in collaboration with SAVAC, will be artists-in-residence at the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga this fall. The House of the Unexpected is an extension of Mirza and Butler’s on-going project The Museum of Non Participation. Working with structured processes of collectivity, they will examine questions of race, class, gender, labour and language to address the shifting terms of equity and agency under rapidly changing economic regimes.

This invitation to The House of the Unexpected, is therefore a call to contribute to a series of gatherings that seek to critique and potentially redefine the terms of the social, aesthetic and political commons through strategies of ‘dissensus’ – a coming together of disparate and even oppositional voices - to reconsider the established social and visual order.

Mirza and Butler will form working groups, conduct workshops, lead guided exhibition tours, screen work and present artist talks for audiences and collaborators. SAVAC and Blackwood Gallery invite you to participate in the project through the events listed above and on our blog.