The source material for The Night Journey (2018), Haroon Mirza’s sound-based multimedia installation, is a miniature painting from the collection of the Asian Art Museum that is conspicuously absent from the final exhibition. The original painting, The night journey of the prophet Muhammad on the heavenly creature Buraq, created in India around 1800, depicts Muhammad on his journey from Mecca to Jerusalem with his face unveiled: a type of representation that has often been prohibited on the grounds that images of the Prophet can encourage idolatry. There is a roughly contemporaneous miniature painting of Muhammad included in Mirza’s exhibition: this one is, pointedly, veiled. The theme of iconoclasm—the destruction of images—is thus woven into Mirza’s installation, which teases out from the perennial contentiousness of representing religious figures a more formal question, asking how the relationship between a subject and abstracted information extracted from it and converted into another form can be understood, whether as an appropriation, another type of depiction, or a form of censorship. In other words, iconoclasm is a starting point for the artist’s exploration around the limits of translation that transcend ideology into form. Mirza’s exhibition “The Night Journey” includes a pixelated inkjet printout of the c. 1800 …