Haroon Mirza: Deciphering Nuance

Haroon Mirza had sifted through many iterations of defining his practice before he came to notice that his true medium is electricity. When seeing or hearing his work, the viewer experiences electrical signals in the ways that Mirza has organised and layered them. Whether kinetic sculptures, performances, or immersive experiments, Mirza says the word ‘composition’ best describes his work. He talks about himself as a composer across audio and visual material: sonic baths at specific frequencies, a light strobing in response to the volume of a sound drone, dimming with silence.

His work is not all calibrated synchronously; he devises and experiments with crossing wires. However, with the development of LED light, he could power sound synthesizers and light through the same technological process: pulse-width modulation. As he explains this process at the Alserkal Arts Foundation Common Room, he apologises for the technical jargon.

Having only ever transited through Dubai Airport, Mirza’s talk presented by Ishara Arts Foundation and moderated by art critic Jyoti Dar on May 4^th marked his first visit to Dubai.

Pakistani, born and raised in London, Mirza has achieved international acclaim. Among his accolades are the Silver Lion at the 54^th Venice Biennale (2011), the Calder Art Prize (2015), and the CERN Residency (2018). His work has increasingly graced corners of this region: throughout 2022-2023, Mirza’s work could be found at Noor Riyadh Exhibition, NYUAD Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, The Islamic Biennale in Jeddah, and Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai.

What is most interesting about Mirza is not his intimate knowledge of science, but how he relates scientifically-bound compositions to questions of belief systems or the biosphere. Playing with notions of energy and power across context and disciplines, he asks how we as a species intend to yield energy for power.

Mirza’s Dyson Sphere, exhibited as part of the only constant, curated by Maya Allison at NYUAD Art Gallery, materializes an ‘energy-capture device’ first imagined by science fiction novelist Olaf Stapledon in 1937, later popularised by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960. Mirza’s prototype of electrical panels that enclose a mass of halogen lights sustains a garden fed through photovoltaic panels. Here he asks, how do our human capabilities for exploitation ensure survival, and to what end do we disfigure nature in this pursuit?

At Ishara Art Foundation, the exhibition Notation on Time curated by Sandhini Poddar and Sabih Ahmed presents an intergenerational conversation between South Asian artists including Mirza’s Light Work xlix (2022). Perched on Ishara Art Foundation’s mezzanine, the work consists of an LED-lit multi-colour grid connected to what seems to be a legend on the wall with coloured strips proportionally corresponding to the length of different colours on the floor. A vertical black rock sits within the grid, tethered to the wall. To me, it reads as a fateful sort of journey. However, the artwork is not the composition that lies on the floor, but the reflection on the ceiling. Despite the darkness of the room, save for the strips on the floor, the ceiling is lit up in white light as if having absorbed invisible edges of a rainbow. It feels like the word “aura”, or the fuzzy electromagnetic matter around a halo, and it is suitably referred to as ‘divine light.’

Divine light has a long and mysterious history. It is produced when a frequency falls between 110-112 Hertz. Archaeologists who studied neolithic and mesolithic chambers in north-western Europe found that they had a room resonance of that frequency. We don’t know what neolithic excavators knew back then, but we know that that frequency triggers reverse hemispheric lateralization—a shift from activity from one side of the brain to the other, as well as a tilt to prefrontal activity related to emotional processing.

Through his study of audio-visual frequency and healing properties, Mirza speaks of physics, psychedelic mushrooms, and shamanism in the same breath. In For(a)micarium (2023), he creates a circular ecosystem of regulated sound and light at the healing frequency whereby a colony of leaf cutter ants contribute to music-making by moving over a vibration sensor that modulates a bespoke synthesizer. Stowing his hypothesis at the intersection of art and science under the umbrella of ‘a-disciplinary,’ his works have room to become ecosystems, growing well beyond the phenomenological and what the eye can see.

Listening to Mirza speak, I found myself drawn to the invisible narrative that anchors his expeditions in art and science; the current of history. In his meticulous art, he deciphers nuance. He differentiates between noise and sound, explaining that noise was founded only after the Industrial Revolution as a result of motors and machinery, and it stems from the word nuisance. Deconstructing the ubiquity of noise in everyday life has certainly shaped the way Mirza uses it, and now that he has shared his knowledge, it shifts the way we experience it.

Similarly, Mirza reminded us that while we may think of electrical light as an artificial counterpart to sun or fire, it is not a technological advancement, but rather a spark among atmospheric particles honed by man just like with fire. Once again, historical context alters the way we perceive electricity in relation to ‘natural’ sources of light.

Mirza believes that art has the power to heal by showing us how things can be different. Invoking recent scholarship, he likens art to a diluted form of shamanism. Perhaps it is Mirza’s hope that as manifestations of energy and power, a heightened understanding and creative utilization of sound and light can have a healing impact on our world.

Art and science, the natural and unnatural, the technological and ecological, the worldly and otherworldly, and history and the future, are perceived to sit on ends of each respective spectrum. Mirza connects them so that they meet in a circle— sometimes forming ventricles where divine light shines.

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Haroon Mirza’s Light Work xlix as Notation on Time at Ishara Art Foundation until June 2, 2023