Martin Butler is a British born interdisciplinary artist, and stage director. His work has always bridged and combined various disciplines, dance, theatre, music, film, performance, new media, and fashion, and through this interdisciplinary approach his work explores the new dramatic that the combination of different genres facilitate.

Since 1998 he has been creating performance work, at various theatres and festivals internationally, this season he is developing and directing a new opera for the Deutsche Oper in Berlin based upon the life and death of Gianni Versace.

His new media and installation work has been shown in the Istanbul Modern, Beijing Design Week, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, European Media Arts Festival in Osnabrück, Fundación Telefonica in Lima, Istanbul Design Biennale, Amsterdam Museum, Olympus Photography Playground in Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem and Mediamatic, amongst many others.

On the Olympus Perspective Playgrounds Martin Butler shows/showed the following installation(s):

Cologne 2016, Barcelona and Copenhagen 2017: "ø"

"ø" is a performative installation by the artist and stage director that plays with the optical illusions of depth and perspective,  that makes each visitor a central performer to the work.

Hidden in the title is the trick of the illusion, as the viewer enters into a theatrical surrealist space inspired by danish design, a twisted reality becomes apparent, where nothing is as it first seems from the outside.

Zurich 2016: "Doors of Perception"

"Doors of Perception" is also a performative installation which plays with the optical illusion of depth and perspective. The visitor himself is the central actor of the artwork. Inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s film classics "Shining" the visitor on entering the room slips into a twisted reality with endless corridors in which nothing seems to be as it appears form the outside.

Paris 2015: "Into the Eye"

Berlin 2014: "Alice through the keyhole"

"Alice through the keyhole" is an experimental room concept, in which the visitor becomes the center of the installation. It is a so called Ames room, in which structural and creative measures evoke fascinating displacements and shifts of perspective and proportions.

Choosing the title "Alice through the keyhole" Butler refers to Lewis Carroll’s novel "Alice in Wonderland" (1864) and its sequel "Alice through the looking glass" (1871), 2010 created as a 3D fantasy film by director  Tim Burton.

Here Alice experiences herself as well as her surroundings during a kind of dream journey through an underground world, which from time to time appears smaller, or bigger and which makes her loose orientation.

Portrait © Gautier Pellegrin

Installation © diephotodesigner.de