Admiror is a collaborative work by artists Bahar Noorizadeh and Klara Kofen that stages five episodic dialogues on the sentimental logic of capitalism. 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 the feeling of “sympathy”, rested on the imaginative affordances of the spectator. 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 today is aspiring to. In this, the work tries to understand the affective underbelly of these structures, their inherent mysticism, and desirous qualities. It tries to articulate the potential for thinking the subject of the revolution, mapping the process of “rehearsing new models” onto the ever shorter window of change climate change offers us.
Biography
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. 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.
Reading:
Martijn Koning, “Money as Icon”, in The Emotional Logic of Capitalism, What Progressives have Missed, Stanford University Press, 1975.
For more information on our group and the CDI please visit our website.