Wednesday, May 16th
Doors 8pm, Film start at 9pm
Mindpirates are pleased to present the recent film projects of Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin and Shezad Dawood. We will screen “Not in order of appearance” by Max Pinckers in collaboration with Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, based on an idea by Shetareh Shahbazi, and ‘A Mistery Play’ and ‘Feature’ by Shezad Dawood.
Artists have been working in participatory ways for decades, going beyond the intimate experience of an individual viewer meeting a work of art for the first time and being moved in an extraordinary way. One such artist is London-based Shezad Dawood, a visual artist who works in many media. A Mystery Play is an atmospheric black and white short, of thirteen minutes in length, with the action (a lyrical interweaving of the plausible connections between the various characters and the city), intercut with the various stages of initiation incorporated into the architecture of the Legislative Building. The film builds to a final climactic scene, restaging one of the key stunts from Keaton’s classic 1928 Steamboat Bill Jr., where a house appears to spiral down to the ground in a storm, and Keaton steps through the door, thus bringing together the strands of architecture and screen magic. The film was commissioned for Plug In, and features a score by Michael G Mills, the Wyoming-born composer who has been a former composer-in-residence with both the London Philharmonic and the Deal music festival. Like much of Dawood’s work Feature engages with mythologies, (in)authenticity, multiple authorship and intercultural interpretations. It was conceived and filmed as a series of performances linked by an overarching narrative of The Battle of Little Big Horn, perhaps the most famous war between the Federal Government and Native Americans. The re-enactment departs from a traditional or revisionist interpretation as it takes on Billy the Krishna (a merging of Billy the Kid and Hinduism’s Lord Krishna), a Valkyrie opera singer and dead cowboys reawakening as zombies. The film deconstructs the Western film genre as it interweaves other fictional and factual characters. The relocation of the battle to a Cambridgeshire landscape further challenges the residual idea of authenticity and creates a new open-ended text that feeds back into a narrative dynamic – that of the process itself. Shezad Dawood Born in London in 1974, Dawood works across various media and much of his practice involves collaboration, frequently working with other artists to create unique networks around a given project or site. These networks map across different geographic locations and communities and are particularly concerned with acts of translation and restaging. For example, his collaborative film project, ‘Feature’ (2008), which relocated the action of a traditional western to the English countryside, slipping into other sub-genres such as the zombie-flick, and Wagnerian opera (and features cameos from artists Jimmie Durham and David Medalla), as well as South Asian god-flick. Dawood is one of the winners of the 2011 Abraaj Capital Art Prize. His work has been exhibited internationally, including as part of ‘Altermodern’, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, at Tate Britain, and the 53rd Venice Biennale (both 2009), and the Busan Biennale in Korea (2010). His further extensive exhibitions include interventions in cities such as Tangiers, Mumbai, Karachi, Hamburg, and Singapore. Projects include a solo touring exhibition opening at Modern Art Oxford in April 2012 and a solo exhibition at Parasol Unit, London (2013). He currently lives and works in London, where he is Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow in Experimental Media at the University of Westminster. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin From 2000 to 2002 both were creative directors for Colours. The artists pursue a practice that interrogates the documentary and ethnographic traditions of photography and film with critical rigor, thus investigating the limits and possibilities of photography in an age of image saturation. They explore worlds beyond the range of current reportage. 
A Mystery Play (Shezad Dawood, 2010)
Feature (Shezad Dawood, 2008)
Not in Order of Appearance (Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Max Pinckers, 2011)
In collaboration with Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Max Pinckers took up a challenge posed by the artist Setareh Shahbazi to make a film composed of all the fictional artists that have ever appeared in fictional films. This is only the beginning…
Based in London, together they have produced 5 photographic books; TRUST (2000) which accompanied their solo- show at The Hasselbad Center; GHETTO (2003) a collection of their work as editors and principal photographers of Colors magazine; MR. MKHIZE’S PORTRAIT (2004) which documented South Africa ten years after apartheid and accompanied their solo-show at The Photographer’s Gallery; CHICAGO (2006), an exploration of contemporary Israel, published by SteidlMACK in conjunction with a solo-show at The Stedelijk Museum; and FIG which will be published by SteidlPHOTOWORKS in 2007 with an exhibition at The John Hansard Gallery, UK.
Broomberg and Chanarin regularly teach workshops and give master classes in photography, as well as lecturing on the MA in Documentary Photography at LCC in London. They are the recipients of numerous awards, including the Vic Odden award from the Royal Photographic Society and continue to work for a number of magazines including The Guardian Weekend and The Telegraph Magazine.
