Haroon Mirza
Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO for Choral Octet
with Focal Point Gallery
In July 2025, we presented a newly commissioned audio installation and live performance by Haroon Mirza with Focal Point Gallery, alongside our exhibition In Other Worlds: Acts of Translation.
The exhibition In Other Worlds: Acts of Translation engages with the theme of translation — through storytelling and myth, history and memory, language and materiality and features a newly commissioned audio installation and live performance by Haroon Mirza.
Mirza is known for creating autonomous, self-powering systems that generate sound and light from electrical signals. For In Other Worlds, the artist presented a new audio work and live performance with a choir and actors from the local leading drama school, East 15. The audio work is played at intervals in the gallery space, throughout the exhibition’s duration, instigating a dialogue between the works on view and this sonic intervention.
The live performance explored translation through sound, rhythm, performance and communal participation. By weaving together voices that translate electrical signals into voiced notes, Mirza’s commission made translation a live and participatory process, one that revealed the endless possibilities of the human voice.
This new work, titled Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO for Choral Octet (2025) is a 'translation’ of a previous installation titled Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO (2013). Adam and Eve refer to the brands of speakers used in the installation and their names become the basis for a text exploring origin stories performed by actors. The “UFO” is not a flying saucer but a small octagonal LED circuit, like that of a bicycle light. Mirza deliberately plays on the title’s evocation of the religious and otherworldly and, in his hands, the circuit becomes a medium for translating invisible energy into mysterious sounds.
For this new work, signals are emitted by the UFO and translated into tones at musical octave intervals of 111Hz — a frequency long associated with both divine and bodily resonance — and sung by an eight-person choir. What begins as silent, electrical data becomes something sensorial, variable, even mystical, as the signals are translated into the complexity of the human voice.
