Mira Calix

Mira Calix is an award-winning artist and composer based in the United Kingdom. Music and sound, which she considers a sculptural material, are at the centre of her practice. Her work explores the manipulation of the material into visible, physical forms through multi-disciplinary installations, sculpture, video and performance works. Calix’s practice is deliberately disjunctive, allowing research, site, and subject to influence a fluid choice of materials and mediums.

Calix has been commissioned by and exhibited and performed works in many leading cultural institutions, festivals and ensembles internationally, most recently the Hayward Gallery, Serpentine Galleries, the 1st Coventry Biennial, The Royal Shakespeare Company, UK in China 2015 cultural exchange program, Carriageworks, MONA, Performa, the Barbican, Art Basel, Lincoln Center, Manchester International festival and the London Olympics among others.

In 2019, Calix has presented a multimedia installation at the renowned National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa. She also created a new work commissioned by Lower Green as part of the Sacred and/or Secular series, led by HERILIGION that took place at Hungate Medieval Art in Norwich. Titled shilabelela, it was an immersive sound-sculpture produced in collaboration with fifty contributors that linked the church’s unique acoustics to the wider city and the world beyond. Calix also took part in the Circus of Truth at Bozar in Brussels, a single collaborative work of art realised by six international artists who had never worked together before that resulted a performative exploration of questions of truth, facts, propaganda and fiction presented. Also she collaborated with UVA in London, presented a new installation in Shanghai, and created new works for Bozar in Brussels.

In 2018 Calix joined the London Sinfonietta, at the Hayward Gallery’s major Andreas Gursky retrospective, for the second in a series of four world premiere commissions that marked the Sinfionetta’s 50th anniversary season. Her work was a live musical response to Gursky’s iconic 2015 photograph Rückblick, which depicts Germany’s most recent chancellors. The title, they talk about art, we talk about money refers to a quote by Oscar Wilde: “When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money”, the composition aptly captured the rhythm, color and complexity of Gursky’s work.

Further commissions in 2018 included a new processed-based performance piece titled 'if or unless?' for Good Grief, Charlie Brown! a group exhibition at Somerset House, and a new sound installation at The Tower of London on display from the 4th to 11th November, an ambitious choral work for Beyond The Deepening Shadow —part of the art installation conceived for their armistice celebrations that gained international acclaim. Calix also received a Gold and The Peοple’s Lovie Award in the Music & Entertainment category for Ode to the future, a sculptural and musical work that involved working with 6 foetuses in utero.

'if or unless?' (2018) is informed by the depiction of musical notation in Charles M. Schulz’s hugely influential Peanuts comic strips. Calix presents this video artwork, which she has edited with a non-representational, abstracted narrative, and its accompanying quadraphonic soundtrack, as a sculptural entity. In the work musicians and dancers perform her musical and choreographed score by moving through the space. Interventions in the physical and sonic landscape, their actions have musical consequences. The instrumentation of this audio-visual work consists of a pair of string quartets, that play out the narrative tensions between the characters, and the sculptural attributes of sound. Dressed in block colors, they equate to Lucy, Snoopy and Woodstock (Schroeder’s distractions from his art). All but the cellos, who depict a rooted Schroeder, move on a free trajectory, pulling and pushing from this central force. The interplay between the musicians and dancers, whom Calix has dressed to represent the score as an object, intervene in the musician’s pathway: the work illustrates both the physicality of music and the relationships between characters in the strip.

'Beyond the deepening shadow' (2018) filled the Tower of London’s moat with thousands of individual flames: a public act of remembrance for the lives of the fallen, honoring their sacrifice. Calix was specially commissioned by the Historic Royal Palaces to create a sound installation to accompany the visual presentation designed by Tom Piper. Calix’s new work was a sonic exploration of the shifting tide of political alliances, friendship, love and loss in war. She created an intimate and sensory promenade piece, which transformed the moat into a participatory sound installation. At the centre of the sound installation was a new choral work, with words from War Poet Mary Borden’s Sonnets to a Soldier.

In 2016 Calix opened the Moving Museum 35, a temporary sound art mixed-media installation situated on a public bus in China. Her project was created in collaboration with students based at Nanjing University Of the Arts, and was supported by the British Council, PRS Foundation and JCDecaux, part of the UK in China 2015 cultural exchange program. The temporary museum is open to the public daily, in the city of Nanjing, until April 2016.

Inside There Falls, a mixed media installation at Carriageworks in Australia, premiered in 2015 as part of the Sydney Festival. The artwork was a multi-sensory large-scale installation of paper, sound and movement. A blanched new landscape that seamlessly blended technological innovation and organic materials, by exploring the nature of storytelling. Calix invited acclaimed choreographer Raphael Bonachela to participate in the work which incorporated durational performances by members of the Sydney Dance Company.

Mira Calix is a participant of the Onassis AiR (Inter)national Residency Program 2019-20.