From February – March 2012 The Island will present Haroon Mirza as the latest in a series of co-produced residencies, exhibitions and broadcasts at the Clocktower Gallery and online at ARTonAIR.org. This ongoing project brings together artists who in various ways negotiate the space of transition between aural and visual modes of production and dissemination, investigating how music and noise function as a forms of cultural disruption, charged with the potential to collapse genre boundaries and subvert social and cultural institutions.

Mirza will be resident in one of the studio spaces at the Clocktower Gallery for 2 months creating a process-based work and series of events and broadcasts on ARTonAIR.org. The Island Studio Sessions: Haroon Mirza is curated by The Island (Andrew Bonacina and Victoria Brooks) and Alanna Heiss. A playlist selected by Haroon Mirza provided exclusively to ARTonAIR.org can be heard here.

An Echo Button — Performa 11, New York

Known for their technical experimentation with popular visual culture, sound, and sculpture, the artists will present a project for Times Square that responds to the history and the spectacle of the site: the ball drop on New Year’s Eve; the sound generated by Max Neuhaus’ 1977 sound installation Times Square; and the signs on corporate billboards. This site-specific work consists of visual projections on the Toshiba screens in Times Square as well as a conceptual installation, functioning as an echo chamber for the projections in Times Square.

Using an eclectic range of objects and elements including used furniture, outdated electric appliances, electronic materials, light and the appropriated work of other artists, Mirza creates complex audio installations which investigate the moment where noise becomes music.

For his new installation made for Gallery 3, Mirza is bringing together a number of instruments traditionally associated with bands including a keyboard, drum kit and synthesisers fused with turntables, LED lighting, lamps and radios in order to create a minimal audio composition.

In Mirza’s assemblages each element plays a specific part; objects affect each other and are reconfigured in different ways. Similar to a band there is no singular focus rather the work is a constantly moving combination of elements which merge through discordant and harmonious beats and rhythms. Through an investigation of both sculptural assemblage and musical composition Mirza reveals the formation of music in the course of an autonomous live experience.

Part of his installation for Camden Arts Centre re-uses an idea originated in a work by Angus Fairhurst, Underdone / Overdone Paintings (1998) where he allowed the audience to play the drums while looking at his paintings. Mirza is exhibiting a number of these paintings as well as a drum kit as part of his exhibition in order to honour Fairhurst’s original intention for the work. Visitors will be able to make their own rhythmic contribution of noise, sound or music to Mirza’s controlled acoustic environment.

Mirza views his use of other artists work in the same way as he views the found objects and musical equipment in an installation; each containing their own social and political history so when combined together new contexts are formed. Mirza is interested in taking art to the peripheries of music and his work is informed by the history of both art and music – specifically the avant-garde musicians Edgar Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who pushed music into the language of visual art.

This exhibition is organised in collaboration with Spike Island, Bristol and is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation and Outset Contemporary Art Fund.

Taka Tak, 2008