The New Deal

This solo exhibition made for the Walker Arts Center is based on four UN Resolutions on Iraq dated 1990 (x2), 2002 and 2003. Each Resolution is one sentence, and each is significant not just in their claims and content, but also in their voice, grammar, sense of authority, and rule under law. Liberty is a founding and legitimising principle of the United States and liberalism in the U.S is a whole way of being and thinking. It is a type of relation between the governors and the governed, and there has never been a more concentrated vision of contemporary U.S. neo-liberal utopia than Bremers 100 orders in Iraq. These laws were put in place by the Bush administration who attempted to force more wrenching changes in one sweletering summer than the IMF has managed to enact over three decades in Latin America. These orders are core beliefs of the Neo-Conservatives and in this concentrated form it can be seen how far U.S liberal values have shifted from Roosevelt's Works Project Administration (which is a key part of the Walker Arts Center history) to a vision of the Free Market.

"For the US debut of this ongoing project, Mirza and Butler transform the Walker’s Medtronic Gallery into a multilayered installation and evolving social space that interrogates the shifting allegiances, contracts, and “new deals” between nation states and their citizens. A selection of video works highlights the precarious nature of this relationship as witnessed through significant geopolitical events, from the Lawyers Movement protests in Pakistan to the Arab Spring and widespread austerity rallies in Europe.

Incorporated as a central feature of the exhibition, a live production set serves as the backdrop for the artists and members of the Twin Cites community to workshop, rehearse, and stage one of Bertolt Brecht’s short “learning plays”—The Exception and the Rule, a tale of corruption, exploitation, and injustice". (Walker Arts Center)

A program of informal public conversations and commissioned texts for the Walker’s website further animate the exhibition. Other work in the exhibition include: Hold Your Ground (2012), Act 157 (2011), Act 171 and the Exception and the Rule (2009)

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