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.

For her new mural commission Bahar Noorizadeh approaches the facade of The Showroom as a portal into her new detective mystery video game. The skin of The Showroom becomes an entrance to polyphonic histories of Church Street and its surrounding area across different spaces: architecture drifting aloft, subterranean police stations, and buried subways. Playable via a mobile console that will tour the neighbourhood, the video game renders what exists, what has been erased, and what remains plausible. The narrative is structured as an evolving conspiracy. Here, Noorizadeh combines her interest in information regimes and their shaping of urban space with her research into gamification as a mechanism of political and economic control. Informed by local oral histories and memories gathered by the artist, the work traces the ongoing development, re-zoning, and gentrification of The Showroom’s surrounding area, seeking to address these as markers of the capitalisation of urban life. The game’s structure remains open-ended and additive, with new puzzles folded into the plot throughout the year.

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, 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).

baharnoorizadeh.com