Bahar Noorizadeh

The multidisciplinary artist will develop her project Friedman in Iran during her stay at Medialab.

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 might look 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. 

During her artist residency in Medialab Matadero, Noorizadeh will be developing her project Friedman in Iran, for which she will produce a false history/parafictional account of Milton Friedman’s son David Friedman’s travels to Iran before and after the Islamic revolution, visiting the petroleum sites in the south, and the potentials he saw in the state’s institutions to ensure the autonomy of the market’s ideological super-computer: market’s esotericism protected by the theocratic state. The story will shift to uncover the current landscape of gig economies and service industries pervading all aspects of the national economy. 

Her work has appeared at the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennial 2021, Taipei Biennial 2023, Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program, Transmediale Festival, DIS Art platform, Berlinale Forum Expanded, and Geneva Biennale of Moving Images among others. Noorizadeh has contributed essays to e-flux Architecture, Journal of Visual Culture, and Sternberg Press; and forthcoming anthologies from Duke University Press and MIT Press. She completed a PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London where she held a SSHRC doctoral fellowship. 

The artist will be screening two of her previous works, Teslaism and Free to Choose, on the 17th of October at 19:15 hrs in the Aulario in Matadero, followed by a conversation with Medialab’s curator Eduardo Castillo-Vinuesa.