HAROON MIRZA, The System, 2014, bespoke media device, three-channel video, six-channel electrical signal, LEDs, speakers, copper tape, Eileen Gray interpretation material from the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Courtesy Zabludowicz Collection, London.

HRM199: For a Partnership Society

Haroon Mirza

Ned Carter Miles

Zabludowicz Collection

United Kingdom

Three of the four works in Haroon Mirza’s recent exhibition at the Zabludowicz Collection in London rely upon the chaotic accumulation of multiple types of media. Mounted across several dimly lit rooms in the former Methodist chapel, they stimulated visitors’ senses using sound, video and electronic lights, while also appropriating and altering past creations by Mirza and others whose works are collected by Zabludowicz. In the building’s main hall was a new iteration of a previously displayed installation, The System (2014), which consists almost entirely of recycled elements from the exhibition that preceded Mirza’s, a retrospective of the Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray and, like other pieces here, it is more easily understood sensuously than verbally. An abrasive and glitchy soundscape filling the space, flashing LED lights, screens displaying pixelated images in vivid colours and a corrupted version of a famous video in which the Icelandic musician Björk muses dreamily on her relationship with television all contribute to a work that is more fruitfully experienced than observed.

HAROON MIRZA, Pathological Theology, 2017, Emerging Paradigm media player, three-channel video, eight-channel electrical signal, carpet, existing works from the Zabludowicz Collection: _Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO, 2013, active speakers, UFO circuit, microphone cables, glass vases; STEVEN CLAYDON, extract from The Fictional Pixel, 2008, digital video: 9 min; RACHEL MACLEAN, edited version of Germs, 2013, digital video: 3 min; SONNY SANJAY VADGAMA, Eye For An Eye 1, 2009, 4D-video: 9 min 45 sec; STAN VANDERBEEK, Poemfield No. 3, 1967, digitally transferred 16 mm film with color and no sound: 9 min 45 sec. Loop: 13 min 36 sec. Realized with Ken Knowlton. Courtesy Zabludowicz Collection, London.

The exhibition does, however, allude to a conceptual foundation using the ideas of cultural historian and systems scientist Riane Eisler, particularly her description of two opposing social structures, one based on a dominator model—that is, a hierarchy—and the other on a partnership model that values “linking” as opposed to “ranking.” As suggested by the exhibition’s title, “For a Partnership Society,” Mirza’s reuse of his own and others’ past creations draws from this theory in order to undermine the hierarchies implied by authorship that define much art. In Pathological Theology (2017), for instance, Mirza incorporates five works belonging to the Zabludowicz Collection by Steven Claydon, Rachel Maclean, Sonny Sanjay Vadgama, Stan VanDerBeek and the artist himself (Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO, 2013), to once again overwhelm the senses. Here, the works by other artists—most of them are colourful, single-channel video installations—are mounted on the walls around Mirza’s piece, which consists of a circle of circuitry and sound-emitting speakers. Nearing the kind of partner-relationship evoked in the show’s title, this chaotic mix of appropriated sonic and visual elements comes together for something that, from a purely sensory and experiential perspective, can be attributed to no single dominant, authorial origin.

HAROON MIRZA, 9/11–11\9 Fear of the Unknown, 2017, Emerging Paradigm media player, four-channel video, eight-channel electrical signal, LEDs, speakers, carpet, Canary Grass (Phalaris Arundinacea), plant stand. Courtesy HRM199 and Lisson Gallery, London/New York.

In another work, 9/11–11/9 Fear of the Unknown (2017), four screens each display different sections of video in front of a circular carpet surrounded by speakers. Visitors are invited to step into the installation and, once again, subject themselves to an array of stimuli. Although some elements of this piece approached a more direct narrative, such as an image of the Marvel Comics character Captain America subtitled with the words “White people sending black people / to make war on brown people / in order to defend their land / land they stole from red people,” these did not cohere into something holistically readable. Again, they appealed more to an intuitive rather than an intellectual understanding of reality. In some of these images, in fact, were direct references to the kind of psychedelic culture that is renowned for questioning the validity of rationalism. Pictures on the rightmost screen, for example, were sporadically replaced with colourful, fractal duplicates that had apparently been processed with Google’s Deep Dream Generator—software that uses artificial intelligence to modify images in a way that resembles the effect of hallucinogenic drugs on human vision.

HAROON MIRZA, Chamber for Endogenous DMT (Collapsing the Wave Function), 2017, anechoic chamber, double-slit laser, live video feed, monitor. Courtesy HRM199 and Lisson Gallery, London/New York.

The reference to psychedelic culture and philosophy was reinforced in the fourth and final work, Chamber for Endogenous DMT (Collapsing the Wave Function) (2017), whose title alludes to a powerful hallucinogenic substance reputed for its consciousness-expanding properties, present in the ayahuasca brew prepared by shamans and used in entheogenic ceremonies by the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin, and made famous by Rick Strassman in his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2000). The installation consists of a pitch-black, sound absorbing sensory deprivation chamber with a double-slit laser projecting a small red dot on one of the space’s walls—such a space can cause hallucinations with extended use—into which visitors are invited for five minutes at a time, and a closed-circuit infrared camera feed through which people outside of the chamber can view those within. In an exhibition that until this point overwhelmed the senses, this setup provided a valuable counterbalance, and lent Mirza’s chaotic presentation the cohesion it otherwise lacked. With the addition of this experiential work, the exhibition revealed itself as more than a collection of dissonant and difficult installations. It was an exploration into how we structure reality. If both external stimuli and their suppression can generate sensory experiences, Mirza led us to question just how, when and where our perception of reality is formed.

Haroon Mirza’s “HRM199: For a Partnership Society” is on view at the Zabludowicz Collection gallery, London, until December 17, 2017.

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