From ocean waves to soundwaves, from electromagnetic waves to brain waves, I’m very attracted to chaotic systems—waves, electricity, energy—that are present in nature, and how our perceptual apparatus engages with them.

The Verbier 3-D Foundation is pleased to announce London-based artists Haroon Mirza and collaborator Helga Dorothea Fannon as our 2023 Artists-in-Residence. 

Mirza has won international acclaim for creating immersive environments, performances and kinetic sculptural installations that explore the interaction between technology, sound, light, and electric signals. Through the use of electricity as his main medium, the artist questions our consciousness, behavioural patterns and ways of understanding the world around us. 

While residing within a dynamic community in the Swiss Alps, the artists will focus on undertaking creative work, conducting local research and engaging in an interdisciplinary dialogue around current climate concerns in relation to the themes of WATER and ENERGY. The aim of the residency is the development of a new project inspired by the materials, technologies and/or ecological knowledge sourced from the surrounding landscape of Verbier, Switzerland.

The residency has been developed with curators Alexa Jeanne Kusber and Paul Goodwin.

Haroon Mirza was born in 1977 in London where he lives and works. He has a BA in Painting from Winchester School of Art, an MA in Design Critical Practice and Theory from Goldsmiths College (2006) and an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design (2007).

He won the Silver Lion for most promising young artist at the 2011 Venice Biennale with The National Apavilion of Then and Now, a triangular anechoic chamber (a space with no echo) lined with sound-absorbing foam and fitted with LEDs that generated a noise which intensified as their light brightened. It is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.In a residency at CERN in 2018, Mirza co-produced a film and an opera incorporating music, poetry, incantation, archive and homemade electronic instruments, some built from discarded CERN laboratory equipment; in the same year his solar-powered Stone Circle, made up of nine marble boulders fitted with speakers and LEDs, was permanently installed in Marfa, Texas.

Recent solo exhibitions have been held at CCA Kitakyushu, Kitakyushu, Japan (2020); John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK (2019); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China (2019); Ikon, Birmingham, UK (2018); Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, USA (2018); Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen, Denmark (2018); Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK (2017); LiFE, Saint-Nazaire, France (2017); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada (2017);  Summerhall, Edinburgh, UK (2016); Pivô, São Paulo, Brazil (2016); Nam June Paik Center, Seoul, South Korea (2015); Matadero, Madrid, Spain (2015); Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (2015); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2014); Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Poissy, France (2014); IMMA, Dublin, Ireland (2014); Le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire, France (2014); The Hepworth, Wakefield, UK (2013); MIMA, Middlesbrough, UK (2013); The New Museum, New York, NY, USA (2012); Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St Gallen, Switzerland (2012); University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, USA (2012); Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2011) and A-Foundation, Liverpool, UK (2009).

Mirza's work was included in the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China (2012) and the 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011), where he was awarded the Silver Lion. He was awarded the Northern Art Prize in 2011, the DAIWA Foundation Art Prize in 2012, the Zurich Art Prize in 2013, the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize in 2014, the Calder Art Prize in 2015 and the COLLIDE International Award in 2017 which has given place to a two-month residency at CERN, Switzerland in the course of 2018. 

Helga Dóróthea Fannon is an Icelandic-British moving image artist. She graduated from Wimbledon College of Art (Print and time based media) in 2015 and completed her masters (Moving Image) at the Royal College of Art in 2021.

Using fiction, sound, and writing as narrative devices, her work borrows from phenomenology, mythologies, nature and her own disparate ancestral histories to navigate the weaving in and out of dreams, confessions, the historical, the lost and found. Creating tender and often beguiling links between these and other narratives, both found and imagined. 

RESIDENCY: May/July 2023

VERNISSAGE: 5 August 2023

Additional details and programming coming soon.