Please Note: Visitors are warned that this exhibition contains flashing lights.
This is the first solo museum exhibition in Ireland by the renowned British artist Haroon Mirza. Are jee be? is a new body of work created in direct response to the environment and architecture of IMMA. Combining a variety of readymade and time based material to create audio compositions, which are often realised as site-specific installations, Mirza’s work complicates the distinctions between noise, sound and music.
Mirza’s exhibition features remnants of the recent Eileen Gray exhibition at IMMA. Occupying the same gallery spaces, the Gray exhibition acts as a ‘readymade’ from which Mirza remixs elements to create a new visual and sonic installation. The new site-specific work, System,has been carefully conceived in response to the very particular architecture of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. The title of Mirza’s new work references the name of the Dublin based ’90s nightclub venue System, which although only in existence for a few years framed a very specific moment in music, a genre of which heavily influences the artist’s work.
The exhibition also features a sequence of Solar Powered LED Circuit Compositions directly from the artist’s studio and a new departure in Mirza’s practice. These panels are controlled and activated by the amount of light in the space, and will change according to the time of day. Mirza also presents, in a new way, the infamous Björk YouTube video in which she poetically explains how she believes a TV works whilst dismantling the device.
Alongside IMMA, Mirza will present solo exhibitions in 2014 at Le Grande Café, Centre d’Art Contemporain, France; and at the Villa Savoye, France. He won the Daiwa Art Foundation Prize (2012), he was awarded the Silver Lion Award at the 54th Venice Biennale Illuminations (2011), and the Northern Art Prize (2010).