Two immersive film exhibitions opened at FACT in February. ‘Free to Choose’ by Bahar Noorizadeh, and ‘Safe Zone’ by Christopher Kulendran. They are equally political, but without the immediacy of the daily news cycle. They politely request your time and your presence to feel something under their guidance.
No opinions. No soundbites. Just information, presented in a holistic space, designed to ask you, the viewer, to experience the news and the history behidn it in a new way.
They both have that current utopian-vision-vibe that’s doing its rounds in galleries everywhere and anywhere, but with the literal presentation being more alter-utopian. Like a presentation of what shouldn’t be, rather than what could be, but without going as far as to present dystopia (if that makes sense…).
In Bahar Noorizadeh’s captivating film installation, she chooses to use the credit banking system as the basis for a time-travelling machine, but I guess the actual presentation is of that system as a time-travelling narrative tool, rather than a physical vehicle for it.
The credit banking system, which I had to google (it’s just credit and lending but bigger fyi), is imagined in a version of neoliberalism that has taken over the world as the acceptable political stance: lending-led, removal of financial controls, and deregulation create a world-wide chaos in what is aptly described in the programme as a “financial science-fiction opera”. This past, present and future, narrated through Milton Friedman’s monologues from his 1980s monologues economics TV series, ‘Free To Choose’ (hence the exhibitions title).
The Nobel prize winning economist celebrating the development of free-market-Hong-Kong, which now boasts one of the world’s largest wealth gaps. But in this version of events, re-imagined by Bahar Noorizadeh, its gone wrong, and we know that. We’ve accepted it, but we’re seeing the decisions being made, flawed or otherwise.
In the other room, a globe of 26 screens hangs from the ceiling, bombarding you with news. No time travel. No future. Just a new way of presenting the present and the past.
In collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann, who supported the development of the video works, Christopher Kulendran Thomas re-presents the legacy of imperialism, and specifically its effects on Sri Lanka, and how the destruction of the twin towers in New York in 2001 started a wave of anti-terror legislation in Sri-Lanka that led to the massacre of Tamil civilians in 2009 was justified as peace work.
The films add a voice to the story, but it’s the gigantic painting, based on the dimensions of Picasso’s Guernica that makes this exhibition so striking as a piece of modern war art. And unlike Guernica, and most war art of that era, this is criticising an entire legacy, a whole human history, that led to this point.
It’s horrendous to someone who didn’t know about these events, but its educational too. It makes war art more than propaganda, it reinstates historical fact into a conversation about modern atrocity, and reminds us of shared foundational causes for so much modern global unrest.
Both exhibitions at FACT are captivating, and worth the investment of your time, but you do need to commit, because it’s not just about the hour in the galleries, its about the hours afterwards reading up on the context, and actively familiarising yourself with facts from different sources.
It works for art lovers, it works for news geeks, it works for activists. It’s pretty prefect.
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Safe Zone by Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Free to Choose by Bahar Noorizadeh are both open until 11th May at FACT
Words, Kathryn Wainwright