Writer Annabel Downes and artist Haroon Mirza discuss the ideas and process behind his latest commission for Focal Point Gallery while on a stroll down the world’s longest pleasure pier.
Did you know that Southend-on-Sea has the longest pleasure pier in the world? Neither did I before spending a sunny Monday afternoon walking all 1.33 miles of it with a Mr. Whippy and the British artist Haroon Mirza, starting from the rollercoasters of Adventure Island until we reached the mirror maze halfway across the Thames Estuary.
The campaign to build the pier was led by the Lord Mayor of the City of London, Sir William Heygate, in 1829. The Victorians were firm believers in the healing powers of the sea, you see. They were way ahead of us when it came to cold-water plunges to “strengthen the constitution” (albeit as a suggested remedy for tuberculosis), and their expansion of the railways ensured cooped-up urbanites could escape the city to inhale some healthy sea air. Southend was close to the capital, and Heygate’s pier—long enough for steamers to dock at any tide—was the final lure.
In a gesture not unlike Heygate’s, British art collector David Roberts and his wife, artist Indrė Šerpytytė, have turned their focus beyond the capital and towards Britain’s regions as a way of supporting smaller institutions and encouraging city dwellers to look further afield. The David and Indrė Roberts Collection—one of the UK’s foremost private collections—has in recent years prioritised working with regional museums and galleries that stand to gain most from this kind of engagement.
“Big institutions are turning increasingly to big names to get visitors through the door,” Roberts told Art Basel. “We decided several years ago with our foundation Roberts Institute of Art to focus on regional museums instead, and it’s a wonderful way to get the collection out there.” Past collaborations developed by the Roberts Institute of Art include with the Hunterian in Glasgow in 2022 and Hastings Contemporary in 2024. This summer, the couple have brought their collection to Focal Point Gallery, South Essex’s only public contemporary art gallery. With contributions from heavyweights like Anselm Kiefer, Louise Bourgeois, Pierre Huyghe, and George Condo, In Other Worlds: Acts of Translation considers how we engage with the past, construct narratives, and attempt to understand one another across time, language, and medium.
At the heart of the exhibition is a newly-commissioned audio installation, produced by the artist I had come to this seaside town to meet. Haroon Mirza is a composer-engineer of sorts. For years, he has been creating autonomous installations that harness electricity to explore the interference between sound, light waves, and electric currents. These experiments have earned him international acclaim, including the Silver Lion at the 54th Venice Biennale and major exhibitions at institutions such as Camden Art Centre, The Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire, and Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Invited to respond to a loose curatorial brief around knowledge and wisdom, Mirza turned to a recent essay by anthropologist Tim Ingold, which warns that the sheer volume of available knowledge today may be eroding the value—and necessity—of wisdom itself.
Rummaging through his archive, Mirza revisited an earlier work titled Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO (2013)—an installation held in Tate’s collection that features eight speakers arranged in a circle, all wired to a central LED light. For his new piece at Focal Point Gallery, Mirza has reimagined that setup into Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO for Choral Octet (2025): a vocal reinterpretation of the original circuitry. “By translating Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO from its original form of coded electrical signals into a score for a choral octet,” he explains, “it signifies for me a type of exchange with technology.”
Now, as someone whose iPhone password has been 0000 since 2009 and who finds Bluetooth vaguely overwhelming, I needed a bit of help understanding how it all worked. Here goes… The title refers to the components of the original installation. “Adam” and “Eve” are studio speaker brands commonly used in music production. “Others” are just that—additional brands, while the “UFO” is a small, octagonal electronic circuit with eight outward-facing white LEDs, each capable of blinking in different patterns and varying speeds.
Mirza created new light patterns, synced them with the speakers, and—here’s the shift—converted the electrical signals not into sound, but into a vocal composition. Working with artist and curator Sam Belinfante, Mirza mapped each LED to a singer. The resulting composition, performed by eight voices with clapping, becomes a kind of analogue ghost of a digital system—a return to the human after the machine.
So, what did this sound like? If you’re into sonics, the translated tones are at musical octave intervals of 111Hz—a so-called Holy Frequency linked to sound therapy, healing practices, and esoteric traditions. To me, the clapping sounded like raindrops—or ping-pong balls—hitting a tin roof. Or, if we’re getting really specific, the sound I hear when I type 0000 into my phone while wearing those Bluetooth headphones. The sopranos and clapping play at intervals throughout the space, echoing between the other works like a kind of code in conversation. In a show preoccupied with translation—between languages, histories, and forms—Mirza’s piece becomes less a soundtrack than a system of feeling: the voice standing in for voltage, the human body tuning into the hum of machines.
If the questions stopped around the one-mile mark, the final leg to the mirror maze was filled with talk of Mirza’s DJ sets at East London’s Fold, his upcoming art residency in Iceland, the precarious state of public arts funding for spaces like Focal Point Gallery, our shared distaste and reluctant acceptance of art fairs, and whether hypnotherapy might actually work for nail biting.
Luckily (for him, perhaps), the world’s longest pier also comes with the world’s longest railway on a public pier. So, for our return, we wedged into the Sir William Heygatealongside every school trip in Southeast England, chugging back to Adventure Island for a slap-up lunch of fish and chips to finish what had been a pretty good day. The Victorians were right: a day at the seaside does wonders for the mind. And thanks to Sir William Heygate, David Roberts, Indrė Šerpytytė, and Haroon Mirza, the air in Southend-on-Sea seemed all the brighter for it.
In Other Worlds: Acts of Translation continues at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, through September 13th, 2025.
