HAROON MIRZA

In the main room at Lisson Gallery, Mirza presents a new video work in collaboration with filmmaker Helga Dóróthea Fannon, continuing his ongoing ‘modular opera’–a malleable system of interconnected video and performance works – in which a tea ceremony is conducted using the active ingredient of the amanita muscaria mushroom. Also known as Fly Agaric, this deliriant strain of mushroom is associated with toxicity, dizziness and loss of coordination, rather than with the hallucinations of the psylocibin or magic mushroom. Its red-and-white, domed cap has a rich history and mythology, both in popular folklore associated with the poisonous toadstool that shrinks Alice in Wonderland and in its ritual usage by Saami and Siberian shamans, as a healing aid or a portal to another universe. Combining these themes of childhood make believe and mystic soothsaying, Mirza’s immersive installation intermixes vocals by soprano Sarah-Jane Lewis, a two-channel film featuring ingestion of the tea by a group of children (the artist’s included) on the night of Winter Solstice, alongside two tabla drums beating out a shamanic rhythm, representing another of the modular elements borrowed from previous bodies of work.

Sound acts as another connective thread, linking the entire show through the staging of an electro-acoustic ‘gong bath,’ for which Mirza has approximated the sonic frequency of 111 Hz using synthesisers and traditional instruments such as a Tibetan singing bowl and a bespoke harmonium from India known as a Shruti box. In addition to the meditative effect associated with vibrational group meditations, the 111 Hz frequency is said to have numerous therapeutic and healing effects, as noted in various medical studies. It also been discovered at prehistoric sites and ancient temples that once hosted spiritual events (for the Frieze Live programme in 2020, Mirza staged MindFlip during 111 hours of performance). This low, droning bass note continues in an LED floor work in the front gallery that flickers imperceptibly at the same frequency.

Upstairs, Mirza continues his series of Solar Cell Circuit Compositions that act as scripts to the film below, as well as another new work incorporating three glass chambers containing an ant colony and a fungal bed of organic matter for the leaf cutters to harvest themselves, while an array of halogen lamps provide heat and light to ensure the ecosystem’s survival and illuminate solar panels that activate sounds created by the ants’ movements. While our societies and social networks are meant to be horizontally structured, but are ultimately governed from the top down by the state, ants live and work in non-hierarchical colonies, with the queen as the solitary, benign figurehead. Rather than following her orders, ants are known to locate sustenance and organise mass movement using pheromone trails, much like the mycelial network that links plant life below the earth’s surface. These sentient paths have gone to influence optimisation algorithms, suggesting that the order found in the teeming chaos of natural systems may be driven by a heady combination of psychoactive substances and superorganisms, connecting divine and spiritual impulses of a collective consciousness with the rational and progressive urges of the technologically-networked individual.