hong kong, neoliberalism
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This online visual lecture by Bahar Noorizadeh centers around her recent work, Free to Choose (2023) commissioned for Open Systems 1_Open Worlds, a virtual exhibition by SAM. Hear from Noorizadeh on key ideas and research that shape the work, which proposes Hong Kong as a simulated game space for market theorists in the second half of the 20th century and economic policy as a worldbuilding tool.
An operatic financial sci-fi, Free to Choose is narrated by Milton Friedman, an American economist who was the real-life evangelist of Hong Kong’s free market policies. The work reframes financial instruments as a time-travelling machine that allows the wealthy to borrow money from their future selves. It follows Philip Tose—an ex-race car driver and CEO of an insolvent company— from 1997 to 2047 as he attempts to escape the impact of the economic crash to seek a bailout from his older self. Hong Kong in 2047 is ridden with the aftereffects of Friedman’s advocacy, where economic freedom has not produced the unparalleled human freedom that he predicted but new forms of corruption. In this dystopia, preferential treatment for time-travel is given to the rich and powerful, while young “credit rating” activists demand universal access to the future.
The visual lecture was followed by a conversation with SAM curator Duncan Bass. This session was held in conjunction with the series Skill Futures.
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 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.
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