Tim Burns

Place: Canberra

Born: 1953

Biography:

Tim Burns was born in 1953 in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia. He is an actor and cinematographer, known for Mad Max (1979), Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) and The Chain Reaction (1980). Tim Burns has been an important figure in the history of Australian underground art. He rose to notoriety in the early 1970s with a series of (literally) explosive art actions, before decamping to New York, where he remained, on and off until the mid-1990s. He now resides on a large property near the town of York, in Western Australia. Rather than identifying as a painter, filmmaker, karaoke videographer, installation artist, theatre director or performer (although he has done all these and more), Burns calls himself “a context artist”. What unites the varied set of projects Burns has worked on over the last forty years is a constant desire to set up situations which critically reflect on our hypermediated, industrialised western society. His interventions are usually created live, in the public sphere, rather than being quietly crafted in the privacy of a studio setting. More often than not, they result in some sort of dramatic surprise or shift in the participants’ attention.