Bahar Noorizadeh: Mountain of the Sun

Artist, writer and filmmaker Bahar Noorizadeh joins us to present and discuss two recent works, Ultima Ratio Δ Mountain of the Sun and Wolkaan. These engaging, multi-layered film and video works use speculation and phantasmic computer-generated imagery to collide and reframe disparate histories.

In Wolkaan, two seemingly unrelated films intersect: a fantastical rendering of the city of Tehran under a volcanic eruption, and a fictional father-son road trip through the American Midwest. Each segment unfolds as an incomplete cinematic event, hinting at the other and anticipating some kind of transformation.

In Ultima Ratio Δ Mountain of the Sun, Noorizadeh’s camera traverses Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, recording its age-old industries of hashish, a mind-altering substance that affects the visual field. This documentary footage is cut with computer-generated 3D objects, an optic that seeks to discover what can be seen anew in its vivid, particled fields of matter.

Programme

Wolkaan Canada / United States / Iran 2015, DCP, colour, sound, 30 min

Ultima Ratio Δ Mountain of the Sun Canada / Lebanon 2017, video, colour, sound, 13 min

The screening is followed by a discussion with the artist and an audience Q&A.

Biography

Bahar Noorizadeh (b.1988, Iran) is a Beirut-based writer, filmmaker and artist working across video, performance and installation. She is a founding member of BLOCC (Building Leverage over Creative Capitalism), a research and education platform that seeks to alter the relationship between contemporary art and gentrification. Noorizadeh is currently pursuing her practice via the collaborative project The Art Protocol, a think tank, website and support structure dedicated to pinpointing viable guidelines for negotiating the informal economy of contemporary art.