Event
Bahar Noorizadeh: The Debtor’s Portal
Solo exhibition by writer and filmmaker Bahar Noorizadeh, co-curated with The Otolith Collective
Friday 13 February 2026 - Saturday 11 April 2026
Cooper Gallery
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design,
13 Perth Road,
Dundee,
DD1 4HT
Preview
12 February, 5.30–8.30pm
Exhibition opening times
13 February – 11 April 2026
Tuesday – Saturday, 12–5pm
Cooper Gallery is proud to present The Debtor’s Portal, the largest solo exhibition to date in the UK by Iranian-Canadian artist, writer and filmmaker Bahar Noorizadeh.
Internationally recognised for a practice that fuses science fiction, political theory, experimental film and collaborative performance, Noorizadeh examines the infrastructures of finance, urban life, and digital technology to open new imaginaries for collective and post-capitalist futures. Her hybrid and radical work probes how economic systems shape lived experience, while imagining alternative modes of social organisation.
Developed through a close curatorial collaboration between Cooper Gallery and The Otolith Collective, The Debtor’s Portal places histories of economics, cybernetic socialism and activist strategies under scrutiny, asking what forms of redistributive historical justice might be possible in the present. Exploring the tensions between artistic imagination and financial speculation, the exhibition interrogates the entangled relationships between capitalism, imagination and collective futures, proposing that financialisation and algorithmic systems might be repurposed to regenerate the fairer conditions foreclosed by the tyrannical neoliberalism.
Questioning the temporalities of debt and indebtedness The Debtor’s Portal pivots on two moving image installations. Described by Noorizadeh as a "financial science-fiction opera", Free to Choose (2023) envisions the global credit banking system as a time-travel machine set in a euphoric future Hong Kong. Narrated by the American Nobel economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006), who believed neoliberal systems were the surest route to a prosperous and free society, Free to Choose conjures a luminous CGI vision of a vividly disorienting future megacity populated by unpredictable inhabitants for whom the phrase “the risk is my company's…the risk is mine” is a constant and vociferous companion. Staged as an immersive installation specifically tailored to Cooper Gallery’s unique architectural features, Free to Choose offers a surreally inflected and unsettling take on a future underwritten by dystopic capitalism. Free to Choose was created in collaboration with Waste Paper Opera and Rudá Babau
Revelling in the aesthetics of a third-person musical racing game Teslaism: Economics After the End of the End of the Future (2022) follows an anxious CEO-DJ Elon Musk and his self-driving car/lover and life coach as they speed towards a shareholder meeting in a post-gamified and hyper-financialised urban dystopia. Adopting Musk’s recently built Gigafactory in Berlin (2022) as its prism Teslaism captures the emergence of a new Post-Fordism system of production and consumption that utilises advanced storytelling and financial world building to devise and implement ‘the look of the future’. Weaving together tweets, collaging dance moves and memes one after another, Teslaism evokes that perpetually postponed but too-fabulous-to-be-fake seduction of rabid neoliberalism.
The Debtor’s Portal is amplified by Reuter in Tehran (2026), a new archival installation and a live performance in collaboration with Scotland based musician and sound artist Intibint. Staging a delirious hybrid of secret dossiers and weird cartographies, Reuter in Tehran traces the footprints of a peculiar organism that has survived through Iran’s economic system and narrates an occult history of pseudo-financial institutions to reveal an alternative cosmology of capital.
Stemming from the alternative pedagogical and curatorial platform Weird Economies, which Noorizadeh founded in 2021, an event series composed of workshops, discussions and film screening will be co-curated with the artist. Directly engaging with the specific arts ecology of Scotland, the event series will reflect and problematise the legacies of the Scottish economist Adam Smith and urban planner Patrick Geddes to address organisational structures, their impact on forms of agency in culture production and the changing models of being a creative practitioner in a world witnessing a resurgence of fascist capitalism.
Public Events
Weird Economies x Scotland
Weird Ecologies of Art
Thursday 12 February 2026, 5.30–8.30pm (In-person)
Exhibition Preview & In-conversation with Bahar Noorizadeh & Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun (The Otolith Group) chaired by Sophia Yadong Hao
Expand Extract Repent Repeat
Thursday 5 March, 6.30–8.30pm (Online)
Artist's Talk by Nida Sinnokrot & Discussion with Adam HajYahia, Bahar Noorizadeh
Right to the City: Art and the Production of Space
Thursday 12 March, 6.30–8.30pm (In-person)
Round Table chaired by Angela Dimitrakaki
Speakers: Tiffany Kaewen Dang, Charles Mudede, and Bahar Noorizadeh
Money Hacks
Thursday 26 March, 6.30–8.30pm (In-person)
Workshop facilitated by Bahar Noorizadeh
Reuter in Tehran
Saturday 11 April, 7–8.30pm (In-person)
Live Performance by Intibint and Bahar Noorizadeh
Artist’s Biography
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 examines the conflictual and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they collapse into one another. Her research investigates the histories and the futures of economics, from cybernetic socialism to neoliberal finance, 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 and organiser of Weird Economies, a multi-authored platform dedicated to radical economic imaginaries. Her work has appeared at the Guggenheim Museum NYC (2024), Taipei Biennial (2023), Venice Architecture Biennial (2021), Transmediale Festival (2020, 2022), Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program (2018), and Geneva Biennale of Moving Images (2018) among others. She is the co-editor of the e-flux special issue on Iran (May 2024) and has contributed essays to e-flux Architecture, Journal of Visual Culture, and Sternberg Press, and anthologies by Duke University Press and MIT Press. Noorizadeh completed a PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London and is currently teaching in MA Geo-Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven.
Co-Curator's Biography
The Otolith Collective is a long-standing artist-led organisation that supports intergenerational and intragenerational art practices through research-led projects, writing, and process-based development. It fosters environments for discourse and collaboration by co-commissioning artists and curating exhibitions and public programmes in partnership with a diverse range of institutions and organisations locally and internationally. The Otolith Collective’s platforms include workshops, reading groups, panels, book launches, screenings, and publications.
Access
Cooper Gallery is located to the right side of the DJCAD buildings on Perth Road. The entrance is via double doors which face onto a car park.
The gallery is on two floors. Ground floor has ramped access. First floor is accessible by an internal lift and six steps with a handrail. Wheelchair access is via a stairclimber. Please email in advance if you require lift or stairclimber access.
First floor is also accessible via 24 steps. Two flights of 12 steps with handrails are separated by a landing.
Exhibition video is captioned in English. Audio will be played aloud via speakers. Seating is provided and/or additional seating available, please ask an invigilator.
For all enquiries please email: [email protected]
Toilets
The ground floor has a wheelchair accessible toilet. The toilet is gender neutral.
Interpretation
Large print versions of the exhibition information handout are available, please ask our Guides. If you require alternative formats for material in exhibitions please email or ask our Guides.
Press coverage
The Scotsman
The List
Frieze
Image credit
Bahar Noorizadeh, Free to Choose, 2023 (still)
In collaboration with Waste Paper Opera and Rudá Babau
Funding support
The exhibition is supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and with the kind support of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art Centenary Trust. The Otolith Collective is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Cooper Gallery
[email protected]