By invitation of Le Grand Café – contemporary art centre Saint-Nazaire, the LiFE is hosting a new work by British artist Haroon Mirza (1977) between 25 May and 24 September 2017. Entitled /\/\/\, and presented by Haroon Mirza under the name of his studio, hrm199, this project has been conceived in response to the monumental specificity of this atypical space which is now celebrating its tenth anniversary.

Haroon Mirza is showing a work at the intersection of different fields of knowledge, reflecting the LiFE and its multidisciplinary programme. The artist has collaborated here with architect Francesca Fornasari and musicians Nik Void (Factory Floor) and Tim Burgess (The Charlatans) to produce a work that sculpts the acoustic space in the visual space, and vice versa.

Since the opening of the LiFE, artists such as Anthony McCall, Simone Decker, The Chapuisat Brothers, Jeppe Hein, raumlaborberlin and now Haroon Mirza have taken up the challenge of mastering the 1460 m2 of the former shelter for combat submarines. Curator Sophie Legrandjacques, director of Le Grand Café, contemporary art centre Haroon Mirza is an artist of interaction, sculpting acoustic space within visual space and vice versa. His work fluidly combines ancient and contemporary technologies, and offers us installations with multiple issues that brilliantly reflect the complexity of our universe. The immediacy of perception is an essential question for Haroon Mirza, who uses sensation to facilitate reflection.

The exhibition that unfolds within the LiFE’s monumental space has the form of a science base where prophetic visions meet with primitive beliefs, reminiscences of Saint-Nazaire’s history, cutting-edge biology and pulsing rhythms orchestrated in an organic and poetic vital flow. Out of this virtuoso game of interlocking, collision and sequencing emerges a nagging question that has guided the artist’s recent investigations: through what forms does humanity successfully grasp reality?