Haroon Mirza

The physical and emotive qualities of sound forms the locus of much of Haroon Mirza's work. His compositional practice involves manipulating found objects and audio visual equipment to harness the electro-acoustic interference produced by the items. In his work nothing is hidden but instead the inherent sounds within electronics are amplified and noise is embodied by its connections withinkinetic sculptural works. Mirza pulls these numerous components together in installations and performances where the individual elements are placed in conversation with one another. His sparse compositions force us to consider the categorization of noise and music and what we perceive to be the characteristic properties of these.

By combining things found on the street or in the studio and relating them to specific narratives, Mirza explores 'the socio-cultural history of objects and the contexts in which they originally emerged/developed.' The items that make up his installations are often readymades in the form of furniture, gallery fixtures or artworks by another artist, in the case of Paradise Loft, a sculpture by Giles Round. These works are physical and sonic compositions, aligning — or even 'beatmixing' — references from artistic, scientific and cultural systems.

For Systematic, Mirza has rethought two existing site-specific installations for 176. Downstairs, Paradise Loft looks at the social, sexual and racial politics of early 1980s New York through the emergence of house music. Upstairs, Current Climate brings together notions of human longevity and fragility through overt art-historical references to two specific works: Seascape (seasea) (1970) by Gerhard Richter and Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Untitled bulb works from the early 1990s.