The Otolith Collective are proud to present the UK premier of work by Bahar Noorizadeh titled Free to Choose (2023) in collaboration with FACT Liverpool.
Bahar Noorizadeh is a UK based artist, theorist and filmmaker whose work explores the histories of the futures of neoliberal affect, speculation, finance, fiction, value, credit, the weird and the unknown.
Noorizadeh describes Free to Choose as a ‘financial science-fiction opera’ or ‘fi-fi opera’ that depicts the credit system of the future as a Central Time Travel Agency which regulates time travel between Hong Kong circa 1997 and Hong Kong in 2046. The title of Free to Choose is named after the 15-part television series starring Milton Friedman which was broadcast on Public Broadcasting Service in the US in 1980.
Free to Choose pushes Friedman’s paean to Hong Kong as a ‘free market utopia’ that will ‘set an example for the rest of the world’ to an extreme until it becomes a theory-fiction that extrapolates the affective structure of Friedman’s financialised future to a degree that is deeply researched in its delirium and intensively rigorous in its absurdism.
Drawing on her extensive research on Milton Friedman, Michel Feher and Rem Koolhaas, and working with animator Ruda Babau, her longtime collaborator, Free to Choose envisions a parametric world of multi-planar levels and megastructural perspectives whose vivid luminosity, ultrachromatic gleam and hypermaxx superimpositions disorient and delight with its unpredictable inhabitants, startling script and quixotic plot.
In Free to Choose, Philip Tose, the actually existing ex-Formula Three racing car driver and CEO of Hong Kong based Peregrine Investment attempts to survive and surpass the 1997 economic crash exacerbated by the collapse of Peregrine Investment by borrowing a lump sum from his older self in the Hong Kong of 2047. In the search for his future self, Tose encounters the chronopolitical hierarchies that divide a future world in which rating activists demand free time travel for all, McRefugees seek sanctuary in McDonalds and Untrustworthies navigate the floating social housing of the Space of Flows that constitute the biomorphic megacities of the Pearl Megalopolis.
Film produced in collaboration with Rudá Babau and Waste Paper Opera (Klara Kofen, James Oldham, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Anna Palmer). Commissioned by Singapore Art Museum.
Exhibition and Public Programme produced in collaboration with The Otolith Collective. Curtain image by Rudá Babau, Klara Kofen, and Bahar Noorizadeh.
Images: Bahar Noorizadeh, Free to Choose (2023).
Installation views at FACT Liverpool (2025). Courtesy the artist. Photography by Rob Battersby.
