Bahar Noorizadeh. After Scarcity (film still), 2018. Video, sound, 31’50’’. Courtesy of the artist.
Bahar Noorizadeh
After Scarcity (2018)
June 4—July 1, 2026
Heather Edwards Theatre | 12-4 PM daily
In the Soviet Union of the 1960s, some cyberneticians saw computers as machines of communism and cybernetics – the study of communication, control, and feedback in complex systems, whether mechanical or biological – as an answer to the difficulties of a waning planned economy. Bahar Noorizadeh’s After Scarcity (2018) is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks these Soviet cyberneticians in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history, at its best, is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future.
How might we use computation to get us out of our current state of digital feudalism and towards new possible utopias? Flying through swarms of floating dots outlining monasteries and city streets, After Scarcity flashes through decades of history to consider the ways in which contingent pasts can make fictive futures realer, showing us that digital socialism was inbred into the communist revolution, and that computation doesn’t mean we’re condemned to today’s tyranny of total financialization.
Please note that this video contains sequences of flashing light that may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy or other photosensitivities.
This screening is curated by Muriel N. Kahwagi in conjunction with Ghazaleh Avarzamani: Churn, Earn, Burn and then Return, curated by Mona Filip. It is on view in the Heather Edwards Theatre from June 4 to July 1, 2026, with the exception of June 5 and 6, 2026.
About the artist
Bahar Noorizadeh’s (she/her) work looks at the relationship between art and capitalism, and their entangled moral, social, and organizational 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 organizer 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. She is currently teaching in MA Geo-Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven and is a resident artist at the Rijksakademie (2026-2027).
