HAROON MIRZA

Haroon Mirza: reality is somehow what we expect it to be – Ikon Gallery

Mirza is best described as a composer, taking inspiration and influence from a wide range of themes such as science, culture and religion and forming multimedia immersive installations, kinetic and audio sculptures and performance collaborations. The composer role is seen when through his use and manipulation of readymades within his work. He takes found objects and explores how the objects that interact with each other to form sounds in the shape of kinetic sculptures. Cross Section of a Revolution, 2011 is an example of how he harness the electro-acoustic interference produced by the items, by displaying how the sound of the radio is interfered and disrupted by a simple energy-saving light bulb. He does this often in his work, where he combines numerous components together in installations and performances where the individual elements are placed in conversation with one another.

Haroon Mirza, Cross Section of a Revolution. Mixed media sound installation

Another way he fulfills his role as a composer is when he brings in context and themes into his work. Mirza in the past, has drawn from his own cultural and religious experiences to produce work that explore into these through an audiovisual perspective. Taka Tak, 2008 is an amalgamation of work that explores the interaction and electro-acoustic interference readymade objects to his personal experience of his Pakistani and Islamic culture, through an assemblage of a video of a Pakistani street chef cooking, an interfered beat emitting from a Qu’ran stand, connected to a turntable weighed down with a Sufi statue and a transistor radio.

Mirza frequently combines sounds with LED lights in his work, playing with the idea of the combination of sound-waves and light-waves and exploring how we perceive the two together. Does the light represent the sound or vice versa? It draws attention to the line that distinguishes the both and explores that further. One example is the work A Chamber for Horwitz; Sonakinatography Transcriptions in Surround Sound, 2015 which is a collaboration with the artist Channa Horwitz. Taking Horwitz complicated graphical coloured drawings, he transforms the different colours into sound and light in the shape of a room. The drawings of Horwitz can be physically experienced and the distinction between light and sound are merged and undefined. This leads us to consider the categorization of noise and music and what we perceive to be the characteristic properties of these, and what can be manipulated to be seen as a characteristic of sound (such as light, or colour from Horwitz drawings). Another example is An_Infinato,2009 (a readymade assemblage of a piano keyboard, LED light circle and galvanised bin) which draws attention to the possibility of the visual and acoustic as one singular aesthetic form.

Haroon Mirza: A Chamber for Horwitz; Sonakinatography Transcriptions in Surround Sound, 2015


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