Bahar Noorizadeh: The Debtors Portal

Iranian-Canadian artist Bahar Noorizadeh presents The Debtor's Portal, a co-curated exhibition exploring finance, urbanism and advanced capitalism through film and sculptural installation. About This Autumn The Showroom has invited Iranian-Canadian artist Bahar Noorizadeh to work with its interior and exterior spaces to present two interrelated projects that will be the artist's most significant presentation in the UK to date. In the gallery space, Noorizadeh presents The Debtor's Portal, co-curated by Sophia Yadong Hao and The Otolith Collective. Originally produced by The Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, the exhibition is reimagined for The Showroom to focus upon two key works - a film and sculptural installation - evoking the monstrous yet delicious mutation of finance, urbanism and mediation under conditions of drastically advanced capitalism. Free to Choose 2023, is nothing less than a new synthetic hybrid: a 'financial science-fiction opera' set in a vertiginous future Hong Kong, conceived and designed in collaboration with Waste Paper Opera and Rudá Babau. Extrapolating from Yanis Varoufakis's Talking to my Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism, Noorizadeh envisions the global credit banking system as a time-travel machine that is delirious, dystopian, rigorous and riotous. The Space of Flows, 2021, spatialises a scene from Free to Choose; projecting a fragment of video over an imploded 3D-printed automobile in mid-time travel, pulled apart by temporal forces it cannot survive. The car is an avatar that recurs throughout Noorizadeh's work, narrating the economic cycles of bubble, boom and bust, shifting its shapes to glorify the ages of Fordism, post-Fordism, Teslaism and Muskism. Exploring the tensions between artistic imagination and financial speculation, The Debtor's Portal interrogates the systems at play between capitalism, imagination and co-authored futures, proposing that financialisation and algorithmic systems might be repurposed to regenerate the fairer conditions foreclosed by tyrannical neoliberalism. Alongside this exhibition Noorizadeh presents her new mural commission In Mortua Manu / In A Dead Hand. Read more Toggle Performance / Live Art Film / Video Mixed media Installation