Português
For its 2016 Annual Exhibition Program, Pivô presents a solo show by artist Haroon Mirza. The exhibition, titled ‘ããã’ is a site-specific installation powered by Emerging Paradigm, an electronic device made by the artist which fits his needs of concentrating and synchronising several channels of light, sound and video simultaneously. In the lead up to the exhibition the artist will do a 2-month residency in São Paulo to research and capture images and sounds for ‘ããã’ which will play up to four videos and eight channels of electric signals in synchronization. The videos will reflect on the current political climate in Brazil, the local culture of music, entheogens (plants that have psychedelic properties like the ones used in Ayahuasca) and developments in physics and cosmologics.
One of the goals of this project is to present the work of Haroon Mirza to a Brazilian audience for the first time, whilst also contributing to the local contemporary art scene by promoting an exhibition by a renowned international artist. It will be also the first time that Mirza presents his work in Latin America. Pivô’s peculiar architectural properties and the historical relevance of its space converge with the nature of Mirza’s research.
Winner of the 2011 Silver Lion award at the 54th Venice Biennale for a promising young artist, Mirza builds immersive installations with light, sound and objects that take as their starting point the exhibition space. His objects transmit sound and use LED lights and technology to redesign/reactivate the gallery space, inviting the viewer into a live synesthetic experience of the site.
Haroon Mirza is an artist who approaches digital language as sculptural material: using technology, through light and sound systems, he expands the boundaries of visual arts, opening a new window to the perception of the artwork. By exploring all senses, his work defies the usual passivity of the artwork and also that of the audience – while experiencing it, one realizes about the core question of his work which is about challenging the categorization of cultural forms.
About Haroon Mirza
Haroon Mirza was born in London in 1977 where he lives and works. Recent awards include the Calder Art Prize 2015, the Nam June Paik Award 2014 and the Zurich Art Prize 2014. Solo exhibitions include Nam June Paik Art Centre, Seoul, South Korea (2015); Matadero, Madrid, Spain (2015); Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (2015); Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2014); Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Poissy, France (2014); IMMA, Dublin, Ireland (2014); Le Grand Palais, St Nazaire, France (2014); The Hepworth, Wakefield, UK (2013); MIMA, Middlesbrough, UK (2013); The New Museum, New York (2012), Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St Gallen, Switzerland (2012); University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, USA (2012); Camden Arts Centre, London (2011); and A-Foundation, Liverpool, UK (2009). His work was included in the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China (2012) and the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).
As part of its Annual Exhibition Programme 2016, Pivô invites British artist Haroon Mirza for his first solo show in Latin America.
ÃÃÃ is a hiatus. The accent over the vowels indicates a nasal unison whilst the sequence of three accents symbolises a continuous wave. Haroon Mirza’s solo exhibition title brings together a central aspect of his research, namely, the meticulous articulation between sound and image.
In Japanese, the ideogram Ma is used to represent the notion of both time and space. The word operates under a relational logic, experienced in intervals of space and time as a sort of neutral gap, or available space, that holds all the phenomena by rearranging them through interaction. By entering Pivô’s exhibition space, the viewer is transported to a large audio-visual installation and is invited to take part in an immersive experience built from a direct relationship with the space’s architecture combined with images created and collected by the artist during his two-month residency in São Paulo.
The work began to emerge when Mirza selected and prepared the new audio-visual material that feeds his ‘Emerging Paradigm’, an electronic device that the artist has been developing in his studio for some years. The gadget is an autonomous system that synchronises different sound, light and video channels, as a sort of sophisticated media-player. In the setting proposed for this exhibition, the device plays four videos and eight electronic signal channels simultaneously.
During his residency, Mirza produced a video that is a kind of fragmented documentary about possible political and cultural mainstream alternatives, focusing specifically on Brazil. This is a series of audio-visual collages overlapping images of news about the current complex political situation in the country, as well as elements of local musical culture, entheogens (plants with psychedelic powers, such as those used in Ayahuasca) and developments in the fields of Physics and Cosmology. The video was edited taking into consideration musical composition processes and structures combined with sophisticated programming of colourful lights flashing in harmony with the sound.
Mirza’s work uses perception in order to question mechanisms of interpretation, taking apart the Western dualist rationale to put established socio-political narratives in-check. In this exhibition, the sensorial impact of his work opens up the way, putting the viewer in the middle of a game of dynamic and interdisciplinary associations sown together by the artist and ingeniously launched by his ‘emerging paradigm’ device. The large size and fragmented architecture of Pivô contribute to create a synesthetic experience. The physical elements are carefully incorporated and juxtaposed, boosting light and sound effects, and are handled as extra channels in the device, generating an unusual orchestration.
In the same way as Ma, the lack of clear limits between artwork, space or technical apparatus makes it impossible to insert Mirza’s work into any artistic classification. The artist brings together languages and materials without any hierarchy. The large-scale artwork is articulated by the multiple links that operate in the territory of possibility and is always shifting, generating a continuous wave of information. The full apprehension of this audio-visual symphony composed by Mirza depends not only on vision but also the viewer’s physical engagement to feel the electric current vibration generated by the device and follow it in space through frenetic sequences of images and noises that work as departure points for a plethora of possible associations that are always unveiled in the cadence proposed by the artist.
By building ‘Emerging Paradigm’, Mirza creates an apparatus that configures its own system, turning mathematical codes into singular images and experiences. The word ‘emerging’ belongs to the field of speculation (the art market and its classifications of modern, contemporary and emerging or the idea of emerging markets, such as Brazil, the eternal ‘country of the future’), and in this case, it is no different. Moving away from the liberal conception of the term, Mirza deals only with things to come, the revolving wheel of time that opens up every possibility so any prevailing fixed model is eventually overcome.
