As part of Bahar Noorizadeh’s interrelated projects – The Debtor’s Portal exhibition and her mural commission In Mortua Manu / In A Dead Hand – The Showroom will host Finance and the Sacred. This panel discussion departs from and returns to the theory-moving images of Bahar Noorizadeh to explore the foundational violence of the economy, finance, the market, speculation and pricing at work in the past, present and future of capitalism. The panel explores how thinkers, researchers and artists have adopted, adapted and updated the theories of sacrifice and the sacred formulated by the Catholic philosopher Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred, his 1972 anthropology of religion. These theories, which have proved influential for techno-illuminati such as the homicidal venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, the co-founders of Palantir Technologies, generate powerful diagnostic insights into the retrospective, retroactive and prospective dimensions of technocapitalism.

Convened by The Otolith Collective, the panel includes Bahar Noorizadeh, Adam HajYahia, Max Haiven and Lama El Khatib.

About the speakers
Bahar Noorizadeh, born in 1988 in Iran, examines the relationship between art and capitalism and their entangled moral, social and organisational technologies. In her practice as an artist, theorist and filmmaker, she investigates the histories and the futures of economics, from ancient monetary systems to cybernetic socialism and neoliberal finance, and the techno-fictions underpinning geopolitical relations and logistical infrastructures. Noorizadeh is the founder and organiser of Weird Economies, a multi-authored platform dedicated to radical economic imaginaries. Her work has appeared at the Guggenheim Museum NYC (2024), Taipei Biennial (2023), Venice Architecture Biennial (2021), Transmediale Festival (2020, 2022), Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program (2018) and Geneva Biennale of Moving Images (2018) among others. She is the co-editor of the e-flux special issue on Iran (May 2024) and has contributed essays to n+1, e-flux Architecture, Journal of Visual Culture, and Sternberg Press; and anthologies by Duke University Press and MIT Press. Noorizadeh completed a PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently teaching in MA Geo-Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven and is a resident artist at the Rijksakademie (2026-2027).
baharnoorizadeh.com

The Otolith Collective is a London-based artist-led organisation founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun that supports intergenerational and intragenerational art practices through research-led projects, writing and process-based development. It fosters environments for discourse and collaboration by co-commissioning artists, curating exhibitions, programming screenings and organising public programmes with a wide range of local and international institutions and organisations. The Otolith Collective’s platforms take the form of workshops, reading groups, panels, book launches, listening sessions and publications.
otolithgroup.org

Adam HajYahia’s work examines how aesthetics within and outside the art market reflect on, simulate, initiate, and break apart sociality and political consciousness. Through his work as a scholar, writer, and curator, he explores the at once harmonious and dissonant relationships between psychoanalysis and social organisation, desire and labour, art and finance, race and capital, and settler-colonial and imperial structures, and historical forms of political rebellion. HajYahia has worked with various museums, universities, and cultural institutions, such as the Biennale of Moving Images in Geneva (2026), the Sharjah Biennial 16 (2025), The Vera List Center at The New School (2024), The Mosaic Rooms (2023), The James Gallery at the CUNY Graduate Center (2023), MoMA PS1 (2022), The Berlin Biennale 12 Curators Workshop (2022), and Mophradat (2022-24). He is currently Associate Curator at the Center for Human Rights & the Arts, Bard College.

Max Haiven is an educator and organizer who uses books, lectures, games, essays, podcasts, academic courses, community workshops and digital content for the radical imagination. He works as the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination and an associate professor at Lakehead University and is one half of the popular education platform Sense & Solidarity. As editor of the VAGABONDS series for Pluto Press, he publishes short and provocative books and essays. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire and The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to Twenty-First Century Fascism. His most recent board game is Billionaires & Guillotines.
maxhaiven.com

Lama El Khatib is a researcher, writer and curator. Her work focuses on the relation of aesthetics and politics, the spatial infrastructures of colonialism, and questions of intellectual inheritance/debt. She is co-curator of the recent research and exhibition project Unsettled Earth (2025-2026) at Spore Initiative in Berlin.