Haroon Mirza

Nam June Paik Art Center is pleased to announce Haroon Mirza (b. 1977, UK) as the winner of the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize 2014. The jury stated that he was chosen for his remarkably cross-disciplinary work, traversing sound art, installation art, video and performance seamlessly drawing on various elements of art and technology, whose experimentality and openness resonate the spirit of Nam June Paik to a great extent.

Nobuo Nakamura, Director of CCA Kitakyushu, who chaired this year’s jury, commented that “Mirza presents his works enclosing many different elements of art and technology, effortlessly traversing domain boundaries. He skillfully combines sound, installation and moving image, and conflating old analogue material such as TV, keyboard, amplifier, furniture and cutting edge high-tech material, positioning aspects of culture and time and transient technology into one space.” Another jury member, Mike Stubbs, Director of FACT Liverpool, added “the jury selected Mirza for his ability to consistently extend a practice, which continues a fascination with media, time and transmission, much like Nam June Paik, similarly speaking beyond cultures, language and belief. […] Work, which demands the imagination and completion by us, the audience, deserves the prize, for his own openness in revealing a process of experiment in creating and re-mixing his own audio-visual system.”

Upon hearing about his becoming the prize winner, Mirza said “winning this award is very special for me because it celebrates the life and work of an artist and his influence on contemporary culture. Paik was a man who really opened up the territory that my work occupies so this is a real honour and opportunity to build upon this area of practice.”