In collaboration with Beirut Art Center, we will be screening two films by Bahar Noorizadeh. The screenings will be followed by a discussion between the artist and Bassem Saad.
Friday June 23, 2023 | Beirut Art Center | 7pm
To register for a place, please write intern@beirutartcenter.org
Teslaism: Economics After the End of the End of the Future (2023)
Single-channel video (30’)
Installation view of Teslaism, Tresor 31 Exhibition, Kraftwerk Berlin, 2022, photo by Helge Mundt
Teslaism: Economics After the End of the End of the Future is a third-person racing musical game featuring Elon Musk and his self-driving car/lover and life coach as they drive towards a shareholder meeting in a post-gamified Berlin landscape.
The work takes the newly built Gigafactory in Berlin as a prism to describe the emergence of Teslaism (succeeding post-Fordism) as an upgrade to the system of production and consumption predicated on advanced storytelling, financial worldbuilding, and imagineering “the look of the future.” The Teslaist CEO is a collage artist. Weaving together one tweet, one dance move, one meme after another, he creates a set of perpetually postponed and too-fabulous-to-be-fake narratives to make time make power. If post-industrial Detroit was soundtracked to techno’s futures, the age of Teslaism seeks its own common sonic imaginaries: forms of resistance inhabiting our exceedingly financialized cities.
Teslaism was commissioned for Tresor 31: Techno, Berlin, and the Great Freedom (2022), an exhibition reflecting on three decades of musical evolution, social change, and city development from Berlin to Detroit, told through the lens of techno’s history.
Free to Choose (2023)
Single-channel video (36’), text
Bahar Noorizadeh, Rudá Babau, and Waste Paper Opera
Still from Free to Choose (2023), courtesy of the artist.
Free to Choose is an operatic financial sci-fi (fi-fi), narrated by Milton Friedman, in which we encounter the credit banking system as a time travelling machine.
In 1997, in post economic crash Hong Kong, Philip Tose, ex-race car driver and CEO of an insolvent company travels to the future to borrow a lump sum from his older self to rescue his business. Hong Kong in 2047 turns out not to be very different from the Hong Kong of “One Country, Two systems”: centralisation has not eradicated nepotism, and activism has become rating activism: young people advocating for free time travel for everyone, including the untrustworthy and the discredited of a corrupt credit system.
In the background is superstar economist and real-life evangelist Milton Friedman’s myth of neoliberalism as represented by Hong Kong: In his long career as a market ideologue and advisor to the conservative governments of the US and the UK, Friedman hailed the city as the modern exemplar of free markets, needless of heavy-handed government planning and control. “If you want to see Capitalism in action, you should go to Hong Kong.”
Much like the economic worlds built in metaverse and gaming platforms today, Hong Kong was the testing ground for the parable of neoliberalism. Once certified in its advanced colony, neoliberalism would return to shape the economic policies of Western powers in the decades to come. In 2023, despite once claiming the highest rate of public housing in the world, Hong Kong now holds one of the deepest wealth gaps and one of the most lucrative real estate markets on the planet.
About the artist
Bahar Noorizadeh looks at the relationship between art and capitalism. In her practice as an artist, writer and filmmaker, she examines the conflictual and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they suffuse one another. Her research investigates the histories of economics, cybernetic socialism, and activist strategies against the financialization of life and the living space, asking what redistributive historical justice looks like for the present. Noorizadeh is the founder of Weird Economies, a co-authored and socially-connected project that traces economic imaginaries extraordinary to financial arrangements of our time. She completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London.
The discussion will take place in English.
This screening is organized by the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) in collaboration with Beirut Art Center for the 2023 Summer School, Is There a Revolutionary Subject?
For more information, please visit https://bicarlebanon.org/summerschool/
Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research 