Third Text

23 March 2026

Angela Dimitrakaki

Angela Dimitrakaki:    We are coming to this interview in parallel with your major show in Scotland titled ‘The Debtor’s Portal’, ^[1] curated by Cooper Gallery in Dundee and The Otolith Collective. One can spend many hours at the show, including at the integrated Study Room – I know I did, the material collected there is a feast for delving into the complexity of the present, but not from a Western angle, I would say. What is the perspective you intended for this exhibition?

Bahar Noorizadeh:    The exhibition is, in a way, organised chronologically, in the order of year of production and my own trajectory of thinking and practice, from ‘Teslaism: Economics after the End of the End of the Future’ (2021) downstairs, to ‘Free to Choose’ (2023) upstairs, to the Study Room that includes the early version of the project ‘Reuter in Tehran’ (2026–ongoing). The Study Room, then, is a compilation of this train of thought from 2019 to the present.

I can formulate this movement also along the axis of speculative materialism to historical materialism. I believe all the projects lie dialectically somewhere along this spectrum, but with the events of the past two and a half years, I find myself more invested in a historical materialist practice. The curation in the Study Room really reflects this assemblage of my own intellectual and political investments: from the deep history of finance and alternative understandings of the origins of capitalism to the media theory of our conspiracy age. The Study Room also includes a body of my own writing concerned with those problems and questions through my doctoral thesis (the weird loopings and entanglements of art and capital via speculation), but also increasingly more writings on Iran, where I lived until I was nineteen years old, from a materialist and political economic lens.

So, all this is to say that the perspective may not be easily captured in a statement, but it mirrors an evolution of an art practice, and myself as a symptomatic subject, that tries to understand art’s material stakes in its local, urban and planetary environments.

Bahar Noorizadeh, Reuter in Tehran, 2026, installation with video, printed text and fabric, exhibition view, Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, photo by Sally Jubb

AD:    Your works in the show have an intense technological visuality. This visuality is used, I think, in an architectural way but you also take responsibility for a narrative – ‘things’ are never just sculptural in some kind of easy ambiguity. Providing a narrative about capital or about the future or about the past, for instance, at this juncture of extraordinary geopolitical tension, in the 2020s, is vital – and you succeed in it. You don’t lose yourself in the maze of the distraction economy that contemporary art often is. What is the role of this dialectic – of technology and narrative about a social totality – in your work?

BN:    This dialectic is actually the title of the course I teach in the Geo-Design Master’s programme at Eindhoven Design Academy: Technofictions – the idea that technological advancement, and its race to occupy new extraction zones (the latest being Greenland) – increasingly relies on mythopoetic fabulation and self-fulfilling prophecies. This is the central premise behind the ‘concept-video’ Teslaism. Teslaism is what follows post-Fordism: it describes an era in which industrial manufacturing is increasingly shaped by financial worldbuilding – an upgrade to a system of production and consumption premised on advanced storytelling. The class I teach focuses on the semiconductor and microchip industry. The fiction mobilising this sector and its extractive regimes is Moore’s Law – a pseudo-scientific prophecy claiming that the size of microchips will shrink indefinitely over time.

Overall, the dialectic continues being a fascinating method of thinking about things, especially in the sense that Fredric Jameson discussed it after the financial crisis of 2008, in his Valences of the Dialectic, ^[2] as multiple forms in various processes and stages of connection and conflict, shifting and yet understandable.

Bahar Noorizadeh, Free to Choose, 2023, video installation, exhibition view, courtesy of Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, 2026, photo by Sally Jubb

AD:    The exhibition includes a major futuristic film work, Free to Choose, mentioned already earlier. The film is part of an installation, to be reflected across surfaces. It is narrated-performed in different languages, an issue I would like you to discuss also in relation to the hegemonic function of language in art. Above all, the film imagines and visualises a future that I am not quite sure what to call. I was transfixed, but I still don’t know. For American economist Milton Friedman, who is in some ways ‘starring’, is it a Future of Regrets? Is regret the future of capitalism?

BN:    I really like this reading! It’s not something I directly thought about (regret), but I like to entertain that effect. Friedman, as the character that’s voicing the early neoliberal desires of the Chicago School, is definitely regretting this future that is exceedingly moving towards monopolistic platforms and accumulation of power in the state-market nexus.

There are, however, other characters and other voices in the piece. A critical one is of the ‘rating activists’, a group of youth who have figured out the corruption of the credit banking system, that the measure of trustworthiness and credit ranking in society is not just – this group tries to infiltrate the future to assure the just redistribution of credit for the ‘untrustworthy’ of the present. Another key character in the piece is the ‘Windowcleaner’. Hong Kong’s dense skyline and its glass facades are maintained by a migrant workforce from impoverished South Asian countries, who are prompted to clean 100-storey skyscraper windows with extremely poor regulations and safety measures. Large numbers of falls, deaths and fatal accidents have been reported throughout the years, and many activist groups have tried to push for change in these bad practices. The chorus of one of the main songs in the piece, ‘The risk is my company’s, the risk is mine’ (which repeats both in the present and the future Hong Kong) speaks to this double nature of risk in the financial hub: the physical risk of the worker hanging from skyscrapers vs the abstract financial risk dictating the movement of capital and shaping the city itself.

So I feel there is in a way a polyphonic affect in the piece – of resistance, of the working classes, besides Friedman himself – and maybe there’s no conclusive central affect dominating this future landscape. Yet I keep in mind that Free to Choose was the last piece before I fully delved into the reconstruction of ‘realistic dystopias’ as a politically generative form.

AD:    How is ‘The Debtor’s Portal’ connected to the rest of your work? Your work crosses media, but it is a critique of structures.

BN:    First of all, I really see my practice as symptomatic of a post-disciplinary age. I don’t see a division in the aspiration of my practice between film, collective projects, publishing, teaching, etc. They each become the most fitted format in which a part of a long-term research and project is distilled and staged.

For the most part, the film work is where I can explore the choreography and construction of time, and the temporality of capital and finance in a way, importantly, that I take pleasure in the process. My training in art started in cinema, and that is the art history I am most indebted to. Editing is where I am most conceptually engaged as a filmmaker. There is also an element of performativity to editing: the way my body and cognition interact with the software and hardware holds the tension of autonomy and automation (being the automated subject of capital) that I like to explore without landing in easy binaries.

This is how I also understand the tensions of critique as an artist situated in the institution of contemporary art. Marina Vishmidt famously tried to expand institutional critique in line with these present tensions and chokeholds towards something like an ‘infrastructural critique’, ^[3] where the problematics of artistic agency are considered rather than safely ignored or cast aside. I see my project to have an affinity with this approach, so I ask the question of ‘how to work from within’ – not the 1990s hacking culture, but what is militancy in 2026 from the imperial core – in all disseminations of my practice.

Bahar Noorizadeh, The Space of Flows, 2021, video installation with 3-D printed car parts, exhibition view, courtesy of Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, 2026, photo by Sally Jubb

AD:    You co-directed the site-project Weird Economies for years. What was your intention there? Why the plural ‘economies’ – which we typically encounter as some kind of tribute to (liberal) pluralism? Although I think that, for you, the plural had a different meaning.

BN:    Weird Economies was initially intended as a research inventory to look into the ways in which people have thought of the notion of economy from a heterodox perspective, and so let that recirculate back into what art, in its contemporary paradigm, can do itself. That is to say, thinking through the question of economy for me is always self-reflexive of my status as an artist, and through the thesis I was also observing my own shifts and transitions as a late-capitalist subject. To be more concrete, the uprooted diasporic artist typology, for instance, and how that has occupied the place of ‘representation’ (national, ethnic, regional) in the liberal democratic institutions of art, was one starting point for thinking about questions of collectivity, collaboration, and historical and socio-economic justice, not by ignoring this diagnostic but by its very (often paralysing) inclusion. I retheorised the ‘Weird’ – in conversation with Mark Fisher, for example ^[4] – as this modality of always ever being contaminated and working from this place of contamination, rather than the denialism of liberal critique.

AD:    It is perhaps unorthodox to have this question mid-interview, rather than at the start, but how would you describe your social and political experience – your origins, trajectory and your ‘now’ – that brought you to art?

BN:    I prefer the placement of this question at the end, to take it up as a suffix. I have been, in a way, a truly diasporic subject since the age of nineteen, when I left Tehran. I’ve lived in Canada, the US, Beirut, London, and now I’ve relocated to Amsterdam. I’ve found my internationalist politics by means of this uprootedness, at a time when a large section of the Iranian diaspora has transmorphed into the worst nightmare of pro-interventionist monarcho-Zionism. My politicisation happened in different stages: firstly, in the year I moved out of Iran, the Green Movement took place; I was on the street back then with my friends. The Green Movement was a historical conjuncture (as one of the origin points of the Arab Spring) in the way that the repression which followed both diminished the dreams of a transformation from within for the Farsi-speaking middle classes that I belonged to, at the same time as foreign sanctions strengthened and the right-wing media and satellite channels extrapolating outside of Iran began to give hegemony to the fascist-Pahlavist movement.

The second phase of my politicisation, towards an anti-imperialist materialism, happened in the years I was in Beirut, observing the splits and divides in the Lebanese community, and the status of the Lebanese Shia, primarily from the south of Lebanon, and the Palestinian refugees of the camps in Beirut; this was a (marginal) perspective completely lacking (still) from a middle-class city-dweller Iranian life.

And, of course, the past two and a half years of the genocide, and now the second round of military attacks on Iran since the summer of 2025, fundamentally shook the stakes of my work, like most friends I am in touch with. In fact, it caused a two-year disruption in my art practice. In this time, the only remaining medium of expression for me was text and language, while feeling the paralysis of language itself – especially English as the medium of cultural exchange of late global capitalism, the equivalent of the dollar.

So, art meant different things to me at these different stages. In my youth, it came as a rejection of Iran’s educational system, its driving people to imagine themselves as technocrats of the future, and prioritising an education in engineering (a mentality shaping the fascist-solutionist psyche and the efficiency mandate of the ‘right now’). Nowadays, I feel I am reformulating yet again what the function of art is and should be, at arguably one of the most drastic inflection points of the past century.

AD:    Bahar, as an artist and intellectual of a historical generation coming of age in this period of intersecting crises, resource-grabbing, mafia capitalism and gangster imperialism, ridiculous clichés about the market economy as diversity, freedom and growth, and so on, is the vocabulary of an earlier moment in the twentieth century – that of ‘post-colonial critique’ or even the idea of the ‘decolonial’ – of any usefulness to you in how you conceive of art in the twenty-first century? How do you see the difference between the 1960s/70s and the 2020s in relation to the concepts and the vocabulary used? Isn’t ‘displacement’ (and it takes many forms) more honest than ‘nomadism’, perhaps?

BN:    I think the serious turn in my practice came with an understanding of the exhaustion of these critical concepts, their total subsumption into institutional codes – in part because so much of contemporary art remains in denial about the class dimension, or even the question of money. My interest has therefore been in practices that do critique rather than merely perform it, which meant getting one’s hands dirty, and paying the cost of your involvement by putting your reputation on the line. In a strange way, I feel I never gave much thought to the common terminology of contemporary art within the space of art itself. I didn’t spend time on the words so much as follow the questions, which perhaps led me back to the underlying problems these concepts once pointed to. For instance, my ongoing curiosity about the legacies of the Left in the Middle East, between the Arab states and Iran – their missed conversations and their defeats – which I think might reveal something about our current catastrophic regional condition. I suppose this is an anticolonial Marxist project, but I avoid spending the currency of terms like ‘anticolonial’, because I don’t want to reproduce the cliché. As for ‘Marxist’, I quite like carrying it on my shoulder (even if my relationship to labour theory is somewhat twisted). It feels so outdated in the artworld that it tends to jar people, pushing them to grasp my political project more immediately.

AD:    Do we need a new anti-imperialist art?

BN:    Yes, we do. And as I read your question my eyes stop over ‘new’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ independently. But I do feel the task is to renew the form of this antecedent anti-imperialist art, given the coordinates and complications of the present. Speaking from the real crisis of the moment in Iran: it is striking that since the war began, on 28 February 2026, not only is there no real antiwar cultural front formed, but there is no antiwar coalition formed in general. It will take pages and pages to give a precise diagnosis of these unprecedented dynamics in the span of time since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but just to say that among those who have gravitated towards the right in the past decade or so are a large part of the beloved Iranian cinema scene. Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, Cannes darlings, have notoriously signed pro-intervention letters in the past year or so. What this signifies is the demise of a leftist cinema, which is very much in line with the broader international scene of cinema that is exceedingly more neoliberalised and hollowed out of independent radical movements. This question, of course, is constantly on my mind now, and the reason I feel my filmmaking has gone through a (generative) respite.

Neoliberal/contemporary art has long been providing an image of local authenticity by extracting from peripheries and neutralising radical demands by laying them out on a level playing field. It is important to rethink our situatedness in the imperial core, and our placement in its cultural institutions. If I take myself as symptomatic of a larger condition and my friendship groups, I see this turn away from ‘production’ of art objects and further investment in infrastructural critique, direct action, and organising in my art environment at large (definitely not representative of the ‘artworld’ carrying on with business as usual). So this is the place I’d like to speak from, not to those who continue with no interruption or with temporary virtue signalling. I would like to discuss this question of the ‘new anti-imperialist art’ in collectivity, with friends who have lost a lot in the past few years and more, by foregrounding collective survival and resistance.

^[1]    ‘The Debtor’s Portal’, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, Dundee, 13 February – 11 April 2026.

^[2]    See Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, Verso, London, 2009

^[3]    Indicatively, see Marina Vishmidt, ‘Infrastuctural Critique: Between Reproduction and Abolition’, e-flux Journal #155, June 2025, accessed 18 March 2026

^[4]    See Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, Repeater, London, 2016

Bahar Noorizadeh’s work looks at the relationship between art and capitalism, and their entangled moral, social and organisational technologies. In her practice as an artist, theorist and filmmaker, she investigates the histories and futures of economics, from cybernetic socialism to neoliberal finance, and activist strategies against the financialisation of life and the living space, asking what redistributive historical justice might look like for the present. She is the founder and organiser of Weird Economies, a multi-authored platform dedicated to radical economic imaginaries, and her work has appeared at the Guggenheim New York (2024), the Taipei Biennial (2023), the Venice Architecture Biennial (2021), Transmediale Festival (2020, 2022), Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Programme (2018), and the Geneva Biennale of Moving Images (2018), among others. She is the co-editor of the e-flux special issue on Iran (#145, May 2024); has contributed essays to n+1 magazine, e-flux Architecture, Journal of Visual Culture, and Sternberg Press; and anthologies published by Duke University Press and MIT Press. Noorizadeh completed a PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently teaching on the MA Geo-Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven and is a resident artist at the Rijksakademie (2026–2027). www.baharnoorizadeh.com

Angela Dimitrakaki is a writer, one of the Editors of Third Text, and Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Edinburgh. Her latest book is Feminism. Art. Capitalism. (Pluto Press 2025).