- Venue
- Spike Island
- Location
- South West England
After winning the Silver Lion at Venice last year, Haroon Mirza’s particular brand of lo-fi DIY tech geek constructa-sculpture is rapidly increasing in visibility. /|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/| is Mirza’s first large scale solo exhibition, a collaboration between Spike Island and Camden Arts Centre who showed a version of the artwork I saw Square Triangle Sine earlier this year.
Organised over the two main exhibition spaces at Spike, the exhibition also uses corridor spaces and constructs a mini pavilion. The effect is disorientating to a regular visitor to the gallery and the most interesting re-imagination of the layout I have seen for the last year. The first work you encounter appears as a late night stake-out at Tesco Extra. Three monitors, all using different era technologies, are stacked one on top of the other. The Tesco sign is broken, it reads ‘Tesco Tra’ – a hummed tune, Tes-co-tra-la-la, nonsensical and melodic. The red sign flashes on and off. In turn, the red light on the back of the screens flashes on or off against the gallery wall. Follow this corridor space around and you get to the other significantly smaller show currently on at Spike Island, Suzanne Mooney’s The Edge of Collapse. As with a lot of Mirza’s work one of the most interesting elements is the sound or light bleed that occurs between his work and others. The fuzz bleeps and sticcato beat repeaters of the monitor work seem to be to be perfect for the ultra-bright white room inhabited by Mooney’s prints and drawings. Mirza providing the soundtrack to Mooney’s ‘collapse’.
The pavilion structure is cut into the white cube at the centre of Spike Island. Totally black it suddenly illuminates via a white LED light halo hanging from the ceiling, buzzing with electrical fuzz. The floor is mesh metal lattice and allows you to see the space between the raised floor and the gallery floor proper. Suddenly then, the halo clicks off and you are left in darkness, having to feel the walls to get out. This is when the importance of touch enters the exhibition, the rest of the galleries have blue, green and black trianglified tron-like soundproofing with slightly gone off faded tips, like they are past their industrial best. I’m not sure if it was an encouraged activity but I touched and leant against the foam as I walked around the show. Gravitationally it pulled you towards it and bounced you against it, the viewer becoming the ball or dot passing back and forth between the paddles in a game of Pong.
The first larger exhibition space is taken up by a large stage with several small works and a drum kit which you can climb on stage and play. Like the previous Camden Arts presentation, this work is based on the idea of Angus Fairhurst’s work Undone/Overdone Paintings (1998) where the artist allowed viewers to play the drums whilst looking at his paintings. Behind this work, tacked on the far end of the gallery wall, are strange scratched prints in different colours. They remind me of album covers from The Cure in the 80’s. This space feels empty and ineffectual, like the remnants of a performance. The work, which felt activated and alive at the private view, now with the one or two visitors and watching invigilators, feels dead. A party over. A plastic disk hangs above an LED information light strip on the stage. The disk lights up red, the same as the white one in the pavilion earlier, while the strip displays a red wiggly line, the title of Mirza’s show /|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|. Both a score and a pattern, the title is the zig-zag of the soundproofing walls. The central beat of the exhibition.
A corridor space separates this area and the final or middle white walled gallery space. Lined on both sides with powder blue proofing it immerses you in the pattern of the foam. I think the use of the soundproofing would have worked as a experiment on its own here. Instead several plinths are placed down the middle displaying plan sketches and computer drawings of the works. I’m not sure the viewer needs to see these, they feel like filler. You see the workings, the electronic and connecting relations clearly on show in the sculptures. To have the point that they are technically complex, intricate, designed and drawn works seems to overstate the obvious. Mirza’s work seems to be, already, both the drawing and the finished article.
The last works have a far more formalist style. I felt, in their draped, hung, arranged style, that I could have been in Tate Britain. Caro, Rothchild, Tucker – the readymades of Beuys. Some of this work is significantly larger than I have seen before. It lacks the attractive shoddiness of Mirza’s smaller work but its elegant, more beautiful even. The speakers that pump their mini beats and wobblying turning turn-tables, arranged wires and record store relics make the work physically appear through their sounds at different moments. Talking to each other, trying to catch each other out with their bleeps and blinking lights.
Mirza seems to be experimenting, at the moment, with different types of work and exhibition techniques. So far the artist has had success from his smaller works that crop up frequently in group shows but these works have been almost maquettes for a long-term body of research on music, sound, sculpture and form. I think Mirza is trying to find a more enduring style that will sustain his practice for the next, mid-stage, of his career. /|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/| appears as several of these stylistic experiments pulled together and presents both Mirza and the viewer a series of possibilities. I wait, with interest, to see what move he makes next.