Bahar Noorizadeh: The Debtor’s Portal
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Preview: Thursday 24 September, 6.30–8.30pm
Alongside this exhibition Noorizadeh presents her new mural commission In Mortua Manu / In A Dead Hand
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, 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.
About the artist
Bahar Noorizadeh is internationally recognised for a practice that fuses economic theory with gaming technology, experimental film and collaborative performance. Her spectacular, surprising, alarming work envisions the ways in which capitalism reshapes time, mutates space, transforms bodies and captures futurity through finance treated as a sensorium, technology, medium, weapon, belief, prop, vehicle, affordance and LARP.
Born in 1988 in Iran, Noorizadeh examines the relationship between art and capitalism and the entangled moral, social and organisational technologies they share. In her practice as an artist, theorist and filmmaker, she examines the conflictual and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they collapse into one another. Her research 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).
About the curators
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.
Sophia Yadong Hao is Director & Principal Curator of Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee. Working internationally, Hao characterises the curatorial as a rhizomatic praxis capable of transforming exhibition making into a testing ground for radical futures. Notable curatorial projects include NOTES on a return (2009), a re-contextualisation of performance art from 1980s Britain; Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? (2016–2017) that evokes the ethos of feminism for an alternative politics in culture and society; and The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins Towards Creative Emancipation (2021-25) a five-phase exhibition programme examining histories and future possibilities of creative pedagogy as a radical emancipatory praxis. Hao is founding editor of the digital publication What I am Reading Now…. Her publications include Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? (2019), Hubs and Fictions (2016), A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE (2015), and NOTES on a return (2010). Hao was named one of The List’s Hot 100 in 2024: The Most Influential Scottish Cultural Contributors.
The Debtor’s Portal is a touring exhibition co-curated by Sophia Yadong Hao and The Otolith Collective, and produced by Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, University of Dundee. Originally funded by Creative Scotland, University of Dundee, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art Centenary Trust and Arts Council England.
