Bahar Noorizadeh: The Debtor's Portal

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.