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.

Noorizadeh approaches the facade of the gallery as a portal into her new detective mystery video game. The skin around The Showroom building captures the landscape of this game, playable via a console that will tour the neighbourhood over the coming year. The world Noorizadeh invites us to enter recreates the polyphonic histories of Church Street and its surrounding area through psycho-urban spaces with architecture drifting aloft, subterranean police stations, buried subways, and fractured streetscapes.

This game world is informed by oral histories and memories shared with the artist by local residents, along with research from the Showroom’s archive and library, 3D scans and audio recordings from walks in the neighbourhood, and 3D models constructed from images of sites and architecture that are long demolished yet still live in the virtual memory of Church Street. Noorizadeh role-plays as a sleuth, noting her observations and clues to a talismanic murder in a pocket notebook while pacing the neighborhood, asking how and where things go wrong when the injustices endured by the dispossessed are intractable, protracted, anonymous, and omnipotent. The game’s modular structure remains open-ended and additive, with new chapters and puzzles to be folded into the plot in the future.

In Mortua Manu / In A Dead Hand is structured as an evolving conspiracy, animated by a preoccupation with gamification as a mechanism of control, information as an urban medium, sacrifice as the social form of finance, and conspiracy as a mode of navigating this terrain. The late Marxist thinker Michael Parenti argued that systemic analysis and conspiracy are not mutually exclusive. We can upgrade his thesis at a time when the gamification of everyday life (under the banner of “participation”) and the saturation of the infosphere with AI slop flatten the social into a set of patterns, primed for conspiratorial narration.

The artwork title recalls the Latin legal phrase ‘In Mortua Manu’, meaning ‘In a Dead Hand’, that is, property held as if by an immortal entity, such as a corporation or religious institution, making the said property in the perpetual, inalienable ownership of that entity. With this in mind, the work traces the ongoing development, re-zoning, and gentrification of The Showroom’s surrounding area, questioning the notion of the public under conditions of rapid financialisation in the UK.

With thanks to local residents Sue Davies, Richard Fentiman, Denis Kane, Sam Curtis, Roya Lacey and Glenys Arthur for their time and energy given to this process. Live-rendered sketches of these conversations were captured by illustration artist Amrit Ruprai. The video-game was developed and produced in collaboration with game developer Alexandre Pina and game programming assistant Ralph McCoy, with music created by the artist using Pure Data, an open source programming language, as well as free license music under GOSUB10 netlabel.