The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism revisits proposals for a communist sprawl in the Soviet Union of 1929. For the Avant-garde architects of “Disurbanism,” the sickness of the modern city and its inevitable centralized hegemony could be resolved only by the city’s destruction and dissemination across the Soviet landscape. In its place, they envisioned an energy and communication grid: a network of highways, infrastructure, mobile homes, natural resources, and public services on the scale of the USSR. Disurbanism would counter modernism’s attempts to resolve the internal contradictions of the urban setting by bringing the rural into the confines of the city.

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 practice traces the relationship between aesthetics and reason and the desubjectification of experience as a pathway for producing new social subjects. Her work has appeared in the Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program, London (2018); Berlinale Forum Expanded, Berlin (2018); Biennale of Moving Images, Geneva (2016); Nanjing International Art Festival (2016); Beirut Art Center (2016); National Gallery of Art, Washington (2016); and Toronto International Film Festival (2015), among others. 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 Ph.D. candidate in Art Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The lecture will be in English.