Haroon Mirza @ ACCA

By Edward McLeish

This month, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) will present The Construction of an Act, a survey of works from acclaimed London-based artist Haroon Mirza.

On October 8, two live performances from the 42-year-old artist took place at 6.30pm and 8pm. Both shows featured collaborators from Australian and London-based composers, performers and choreographers.

Visitors experienced sculptural assemblages, indicative of Mirza’s early work, and engaged in a complex dialogue with their use of everyday materials from his live performance.

The materials included showerheads and buckets, simple LED lighting strips, outmoded electronics, found footage and musical instruments.

Mirza likens his methodology to that of a composer, arranging the aesthetic and acoustic properties of materials and space into new audible, visual and haptic forms.

His diverse artworks are linked through the manipulation of electricity, and share an interest in modes of perception that go beyond the ocularcentrism (a perceptual bias ranking vision over other senses) inherent to the visual arts.

In association with the Melbourne International Arts Festival, The Construction of an Act will use ACCA’s vast architecture as a reverberation chamber in which a disparate body of works will come together to form a conceptual and sonic whole.

New to ACCA and aligning with the festival, Mirza has constructed a residency studio within the gallery as a space to invite local and international collaborators to undertake weeklong residencies and live performances.

The residency studio illustrates the turn towards experimental, open-ended and collaborative working methods that have become a hallmark of the artist’s recent practice.

It is blurring the boundaries of artistic authorship and transparently revealing the process of both art and exhibition making.

Every year ACCA International brings an artist to Melbourne at a pivotal point in their career – often presenting their work to Australian audiences for the first time.

Mirza has won prizes including a Silver Lion for Most Promising Artist at the 2011 Venice Biennale, the Zurich Art Prize and Nam June Paik Centre Award in 2014, and the Calder Prize in 2015.

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