The whole culture’s shot through. The skeleton needs melting and reshaping.
– Faber in Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451
“Electricity is a natural phenomenon that we channel to do certain things,” explains Haroon Mirza, during our phone conversation in the lead up to his first solo museum exhibition in Ireland. It seems apt that our communication occurs via radio waves, our voices converted into electronic signals before being transmitted through the atmosphere at the speed of light. Mirza’s disembodied voice, emitting from a small mobile device, acts as a constant reminder of a technological turning point in society’s auditory evolution.
Speaking from his studio in London, Mirza describes his own pivotal moment with technology, one that would eventually form the basis of his artistic process: “It was basically during a workshop in Goldsmiths. We were asked to take apart toys and do things, but I kind of deviated from the program. They were architects, and they were telling us to use a sound sensor from a toy to activate another toy. It was more about sensors and actuators, but then I deviated from that and started working with sound…I noticed that electricity that lights up lights is the same electricity, that when amplified, creates sound. The same process as electronic music. So from that moment onwards I started using household electronics to amplify the electricity that runs through them to generate sound, which I would then use as compositional material.”
It comes as no surprise that Mirza cites the composer and sound sculptor Edgard Varèse as influential to his practice. A pioneer in electronic and spatial music composition, Varèse’s most well known work, Poème électronique, premiered in 1958 at the Philips Pavilion of the World’s Fair in Brussels. The pavilion, built by the architect Le Corbusier, also featured a piece by the composer Iannis Xenakis, whose music scores, Mirza describes, “are incredible as something to look at.” Xenakis, also a trained architect, would apply mathematical equations to form the building blocks of his spatial compositions, which in turn would end up being the blueprints to his architectural projects. Both Varèse and Xenakis, he adds, “are interesting in terms of opening up what a score is or what music is. They’re more interested in Causal Listening, than Reduced or Acousmatic Listening. Neither is more valuable than the other, but I think there have been some people in the past, composers or otherwise, that have really been experimental with how they produce music.”
These modes of listening described by Mirza originate from ideas developed by the composers Michel Chion and Pierre Schaeffer. Ideas that draw attention to the multiple meanings and ways that a single sound can be uncovered and heard. This is a strategy Mirza employs in many of his works, and one that has earned him several prestigious art prizes over the course of his career, including the 2011 ‘Silver Lion’ for a promising young artist at the 54th Venice Biennale. During the Biennale, curated by Bice Curiger, Mirza exhibited two works in separate locations. One of these works, Sick, comprised of a curious collection of objects; amplified LEDs, speakers, an LCD monitor, a strobe, electronic circuits, and a gold nugget that percussively bounced around within the moving diaphragm of a cone speaker. This piece was housed in a para-pavilion, a structure built by the artist Monika Sosnowska within the Central Pavilion of the Giardini, a gesture that parallels the collaboration between Varèse and Le Corbusier over half a century earlier. Mirza’s other work at the Biennale, The National Apavillion of Then and Now, consisted of a custom built anechoic chamber, with a circle of amplified LED’s that grew brighter in response to an increasing drone, before falling into complete darkness when there was silence. Both works exhibit Mirza’s affinity with Varèse’s concept of music as ‘organised sound’. Though Mirza takes the concept even further, by incorporating objects and space, such as readymades, furniture, and the architectural features of the space in which the composition unfolds.
Mirza has recently returned from France, where his solo exhibition, Random Access Recall has just opened in the port-town of Saint-Nazaire, at Le Grand Café, Contemporary Art Centre. “The most present thing in the town is its history,” he says, “because there’s a huge concrete bunker, a military bunker where German U-boats were constructed, right on the harbour. Instead of destroying it, they kept it and made it a feature of the city, and it’s a pretty major thing.” The concrete U-boat pens that Mirza is describing are the result of the town being turned into a submarine base by the Third Reich in Occupied France. “You have this whole history… so one of the works that I made for that specific show, in the end, manifested in short clips from the film Das Boot.” The large concrete pens, built to protect U-boats from air raids, contrast greatly with the claustrophobic confines of the U-96, the crew of which are depicted in the 1981 German film as they prowl the depths of the North Atlantic, navigating and communicating with VLF radio waves and sonar. The subtle historical film-reference can be seen in Mirza’s work Access Boot, showing alongside Pavilion for Optimisation, an extension of his work at the Venice Biennale, and The Calling.
The Calling is a performance piece and collaborative project with cellist Okkyung Lee, the result of a residency at Atelier Calder, Saché, France and a commission by the Nam June Paik Art Center in Korea. The work has been performed at the 2013 Edinburgh International Festival and more recently at the opening of *Random Access Recall*, proving to be just as successful a relationship as that of artist Nam June Paik and cellist Charlotte Moorman. Though a collaborator with people from various disciplines, it seems the most recurring ones, for Mirza, are with musicians, such as his well-documented collaboration with Dave Maclean, drummer and producer of the band Django Django. “I’m also working with a composer called Shiva Feshareki who is a classical composer. She also writes scores for turntables. We’re working with The London Sinfonietta on a piece together. That’s happening in May.”
For his exhibition at the Irish Museum of Art, Mirza poses the question Are jee be? as the title, a phonetic take on the additive colour model that consists of the primary colours red, green and blue. These make up the colour palette of the exhibition, though Mirza admits, “there is one bit of yellow light,” a secondary colour that is the result of red and green light overlapping. This simple light pattern, part of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to the human eye, also parallels the emergent properties that arise when simple sonic elements spill from one room to another and overlap at specific points in space.
The exhibition consists of one thematic work called The System. As with Mirza’s historic reference to Saint-Nazaire in *Access Boot*, he has looked towards a short-lived club night in Dublin. A DJ himself, Mirza explains that the title of the work “is kind of a reference to this club in the nineties. This is a nightclub that only existed in Dublin for two years, a very short period of time. The venue is probably still there, but the club itself, what it was for that period, was The System. They used to play this very particular sort of music. It was underground, but not house music.”
Revealing further meanings behind the work and its title, he says “it also refers to a technological system, like a circuit board of interconnected parts.” Further still, “there is a sort of subtext, which is the system of the museum. The museum, and museological modes of display is also a system that I’m kind of referring to. All those narratives that come into museums and what gets presented in museums, and how and why.”
This last point Mirza approaches by way of Marcel Duchamp and his readymades: “Basically I’ve asked the museum to leave the resource area of the previous [Eileen Gray] exhibition. There was one room which has paraphernalia interviews, and that’s where my show is going to be. So I’ve asked them to leave the space exactly as it was. Everything that was in that show is going to remain and I’m either going to modify the material or just install over the top it. I’m using the exhibition like a readymade… in my work I sometimes use bits of pre-existing furniture with their own cultural history, or I might incorporate an existing artwork by someone else into my own work. The space becomes part of the work. Not just using the space, but the whole exhibition or presentation that was there before. I’m incorporating that using it as material and modifying it and then regurgitating it and re-presenting it.”
True to his compositional process, the four rooms where the exhibition will take place at IMMA are also an integral part of The System. Describing the architecture of the East Wing, Mirza explains, “there’s a corridor space and then four separate rooms where the show is going to be. The work is throughout those four rooms and it’s one work that is all connected, but they’re different rooms doing different things.” Mirza’s multi-layered spatial compositions that emerge from seemingly unrelated parts demonstrate the boundless qualities of sound as a medium, blurring formal and metaphorical boundaries and aiding in the creation of new ways of navigating and understanding the world, melting and reshaping the system.
Words: Sharon Phelan
Image: Haroon Mirza, Digital Switchover, 2012, installation view in \|\|\|\| \|\|\ Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St.Gallen, 2012. Courtesy the artist and KHSG. Photo by Gunnar Meier
Are Jee Be? is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art between 8 March – 8 June 2014
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with contributions by Rachael Thomas, Séamus McCormack, Christoph Cox, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Michael Eng and Declan Long.
On Saturday 5 April, IMMA in association with Totally Dublin will stage a night of music with DJ sets from Haroon Mirza, Donal Dineen, Adrian Dunlea and Totally Dublin DJs.
