Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts

Performance
Time: 18 November, 21:45 CET
Venue: Østre, Østre Skostredet 3
The performance will be streamed at vimeo.com/bekdotno

“Admiror” is a collaborative work by artists Bahar Noorizadeh and Klara Kofen that stages five episodic dialogues on the sentimental logic of capitalism and their revolutionary dialectical doubles. 

A decade before publishing his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith released his less discussed premise for the ethical foundation of free market economy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. “Moral sentiments”, linked to a feeling of “sympathy”, rested on the imaginative affordances of the spectator. Bound together they formed the emotional order that enabled the operation of free market capitalism. 

“Admiror” departs from the imaginative, emotional role-play underpinning modern market relations, and evolves into LARPing ideas around the revolutionary subject and theories of contingency and change. It tracks the transformation of the mechanics of imagination from the body to the market, exploring the dialectics of “structure” according to models derived from European enlightenment and of the “speculative” that artificial intelligence is today aspiring to. In doing this, the work attempts to understand the affective underbelly of these structures, their inherent mysticism, and desirous qualities. By mapping the process of “rehearsing new models” onto the ever-shortening window afforded us by climate change, “Admiror” tries to articulate new ways for thinking through the subject of revolution. 

BAHAR NOORIZADEH

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 living space, asking what redistributive historical justice might look like in the present. Noorizadeh is the founder of Weird Economies, a co-authored and socially-connected project that traces economic imaginaries, extraordinary to the financial arrangements of our time. 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 the Geneva Biennale of Moving Images among others. Noorizadeh has contributed essays to e-flux Architecture, Journal of Visual Culture, Sternberg Press, along with 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.

Klara Kofen 

Kofen is an opera maker, writer, researcher and artist. She is the co-artistic director of Waste Paper Opera, an interdisciplinary collective who create and produce new works of sound-based multimedia live art, facilitate workshops and curate performance series. Her practice encompasses sound, text, costume design, light, performance and film. She is interested in finding new forms of cross-disciplinary collaboration, the history and future of alternative modes of cohabiting, Early Modern history and historiography, opera as a medium in the context of Western intellectual history and as a material simulation of different forms of synthesis. Recent projects include “Free to Choose” a collaboration between Waste Paper Opera, Bahar Noorizadeh and Rudá Babau (Open Worlds Open Systems 1_Open Worlds, 2023), “Dead Cat Bounce”, a collaboration between Waste Paper Opera and Gary Zhexi Zhang (live premiere at Somerset House, sound installation at Medialab Matadero OpenLAB#01, 2022), and “Good Soup” (with Ensemble Molière, National Centre for Early Music, 2022). Other work has been shown at Glasgow International, IMT Gallery, BOMB Factory Artist Film Festival, the Ashmoleon Museum, Kings Place and CCA Glasgow.

Return to the full symposium programme.

Images: 1-4) Stills from Free to Choose, Bahar Noorizadeh (2023). 5) Still from Teslaism, Bahar Noorizadeh (2022)