6 ½ WEEKS – Bahar Noorizadeh

The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism is the first solo show Iranian-Canadian artist Bahar Noorizadeh has held in a museum in Europe. The multimedia installation she has produced for Museum Folkwang explores alternative urban planning concepts and whisks viewers away into a virtual world.

Bahar Noorizadeh’s long-standing research interest in the history and evolution of urban planning is reflected in the virtual world of The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism. The two videos in the multimedia installation juxtapose two fictitious cities: on the one hand, scattered building complexes in a barren landscape, on the other an over-populated big city with a sea of skyscrapers. Noorizadeh revisits the demands representatives of the Russian architectural avant-garde of the 1920s made that cities be dissolved – and sketches experimental ways out of the housing shortage in a Hong Kong of tomorrow. Her method relies on analysis, dissection, and recombination, and entails several levels of images and sounds. The virtual world is accompanied by idiosyncratic music, historical and fictional narratives, quotes from which stand in fragments and in bold block letters in the countryside. The method is also to be found in the fragmented sportscar that forms the spatial element for the installation. In this way, The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism interweaves different temporal, substantive and aesthetic levels.

Bahar Noorizadeh (born in 1988) is a filmmaker, author and platform designer and pursues her artistic research as a doctoral student at Goldsmiths University, London. Her works have been displayed amongst other places in the Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program, the DIS Art Platform, the transmediale festival, the Berlin International Film Festival’s Forum Expanded and the Geneva Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement. Her current commitments include participation in the German pavilion at the Biennale Architettura in Venice 2021.

The exhibition can only be visited if you hold a free-of-charge time-slot ticket for the Museum Folkwang’s collection.

To order your ticket please click the Museum Folkwang Online-Shop.

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