Rose Butler hosts artist talk at Open Eye Gallery Liverpool – Thursday 14 November 2019
Rose is an artist, researcher and senior lecturer of Fine Art using adapted technology and custom built software alongside early cameras and analogue technique to make interactive installations, single and multi-screen videos or large-scale photographs.
To make work, Rose’s process involves getting access to a restricted area (Parliament, archives, border sites, courts), to have a look, to document and to amass material to work with.
Rose’s current exhibition at Decad, Berlin (October 2019 – January 2020) brings together a body of work developed as part of doctoral study. For eight months she followed the Investigatory Powers Bill (aka The Snooper’s Charter) on its passage through the Houses of Parliament. During this observation she used analogue devices; a Minox Cold War spy camera and a 1980s Dictaphone to document Parliament in areas where recording is not permitted. Alongside this observation Rose selected historical surveillance material from the Stasi Film and Video Archive, Berlin. This included training material for agents alongside surveillance footage documented on hidden cameras. The transcoded, sometimes sabotaged or anonymised material contains historical layering and witnessing of oppression and resistance. These works begin to raise ethical questions surrounding state surveillance and privacy and teeter on the edges of freedoms.
Rose Butler is an artist, researcher and senior lecturer of Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. She uses adapted technology and custom built software alongside early cameras and analogue technique to make interactive installations, single and multi-screen videos or large-scale photographs. By bringing together photographic and filmic documentation, archival material, political commentary and fiction in her research, she examines the narratives that surround and shape us.