Artists Mahan Moalemi and Bahar Noorizadeh expand on their collaborative work in a discussion with theorist Suhail Malik.

The conversation will be held in relation to the work’s attempt at discovering or describing the visual protocols, operational standards, or the metrics and aesthetics of the ‘typical installation shot’. The speakers will also address how the issue of accuracy in identifying artworks and exhibitions could give way to a matter of identifying the position or locality from which a conspiracy can be launched against the reality (of contemporary art) as such. Algorithmic conditioning, of course, inspires and is inspired by patterns of inaccessibility, uneven development, irregular circulation, and the inability to entirely trace one’s view of the (art) world back to one’s experience of it. How would artificial intelligence or machine learning processes enable a technical or infrastructural understanding of the history (and prehistory) of contemporary art? How can (techno-)conspiratorial thinking exploit computational vision to redraw the future routes of exchange, the perceptive positions of transmission and reception, through and beyond contemporary art world?

Mahan Moalemi is a writer and curator. His research explores possible encounters between the fields of visual culture and future studies, with particular interests in chronopolitics and nonhuman temporalities. He is co-editor of Ethnofuturismen (Merve Verlag, 2018) and his writings have appeared in Cabinet, Domus, and Spike Art Magazine, as well as a number of publications in Iran.

Bahar Noorizadeh is an artist, writer and filmmaker. She works on the reformulation of hegemonic time narratives as they collapse in the face of speculation: philosophical, financial, legal, futural, etc. Noorizadeh’s current research examines the intersections of finance, Contemporary Art and emerging technology via shared imperatives of systemic regulation. She is pursuing this work as a PhD candidate in Art Practice at Goldsmiths University of London.

Suhail Malik is Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies, and was 2012-15 Visiting Faculty at CCS Bard, New York. Recent and forthcoming publications include, as author, ContraContemporary: Modernity’s Unknown Future (2019) and ‘The Ontology of Finance’ in Collapse 8: Casino Real (2014). Malik is co-editor of The Flood of Rights (2017), a Special Issue of the journal Finance and Society on ‘Art and Finance’ (2016), Genealogies of Speculation (2016), The Time-Complex. Postcontemporary (2016), and Realism Materialism Art (2015).

This event is part of the public programme accompanying the exhibition When Legacies Become Debts, curated by Azar Mahmoudian.

FREE

Please note, seats for this event are limited and are allocated on a first come first served basis.