Haroon Mirza/hrm199 Ltd.

Museum Tinguely hosts the most extensive exhibition to date of work by London-based artist Haroon Mirza (b.1977, London). The large spatial related installations often include sound, light, video and film as well as randomly found objects and works by other artists. In this way, Mirza creates an immersive experience which challenges the eye, the ear and spatial orientation. By showing existing works alongside several new ones created especially for the exhibition and specific to the site where they are placed, the Museum Tinguely presents the work of Mirza across a broad spectrum.

The Haroon Mirza/hrm199 Ltd. exhibition focuses on the collaborative nature of the artist’s practice. The exhibition’s title, the name of Mirza’s studio and company, ‘hrm199 Ltd.’, implies the essence of his approach. Artistic work is inherently a process with many contributors. It includes co-workers in the studio, the architect or the people involved at the museum as well as other artists. In this case the latter include Alexander Calder, Channa Horwitz and Anish Kapoor all of whom, either through contributing their own work or through creative dialogue, lead to innovation. Various forms of artistic interaction such as appropriation, dialogic structures and complicity between the different contributors including the act of curating itself are presented. Accompanying the exhibition there is a catalogue which takes an experimental format by rendering the creative and practical interactions visible and mirroring part of each creative process in the exhibition itself.

Mirza’s artistic creation is a permanent experiment within which critical analysis and categorisation of art production are contained. His sound, light and media installations are characterised by formal precision as well as the development of complex narratives. They appeal to the sense of vision as much as to that of hearing and explore the relationship between the two. The site-specific installations create a multi-layered dialogue between the materials used including audio equipment, LEDs, solar panels as well as found footage and works by other artists. At times, the artist’s own creations are transformed back into material that is to be integrated into new works. A recurrent theme is “Mis-use”, the creative alienation and transformation of apparatus and its associated functions used as a strategy to break with established functions and to extend possibilities.

With artistic procedures of appropriation, the use of ready-mades and reverse ready-mades, as well as the incorporation of self-governing systems, Mirza questions the conditions under which art is produced and playfully deconstructs the role of the authors and artists. It is this aspect that the exhibition focuses on.