Alaa Mansour, The Mad Man’s Laughter (2021) - 42 min

The Mad Man’s Laughter engages with the simulacrum of the so-called global war on terror, and the worlds of ubiquitous surveillance and simulations it has since spawned. By exploring the fictitious entities that are at play in the military-entertainment complex, the video embarks on a journey across artefacts and precepts shaped by modalities of power and control. Through the use of archival material and computer generated imagery, sounds, and texts, we navigate both latent and visible spaces of violence carved by colonial-militaristic image production and the data used to generate algorithmic biases.

Bahar Noorizadeh, The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism (2021) - 14 min

Bahar Noorizadeh’s long-standing research interest in the history and development of urban planning finds expression in the virtual world of The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism. In the two videos of the original multimedia installation, two fictitious cities confront each other: on the one hand, isolated building complexes in a barren landscape; on the other, an overpopulated metropolis with a sea of skyscrapers. In a speculative approach, Noorizadeh puts the calls for the dissolution of cities by the representatives of the Russian architectural avant-garde of the 1920s to the test and sketches out experimental ways for housing shortages in a Hong Kong of the future.

Originally commissioned by 2038, the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennial 2021.

Róisín Tapponi is an Assyrian Iraqi-Irish film curator, programmer, writer and PhD scholar. She is the Founder of Habibi Collective, SHASHA Movies, Independent Iraqi Film Festival (IIFF) and ART WORK Magazine. She has curated exhibitions and film programmes at numerous international institutions such as The Academy, MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, Chisenhale Gallery, Africa Institute, Gasworks, Art Jameel, Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF). She is a contributor at Frieze Magazine and has written for The Guardian, Vogue, GQ and many more leading publications. She is the recipient of the 'World Leading PhD Art History Scholarship' at St. Andrews University. She has guest lectured on film at universities including Oxford University, UC Berkeley, the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (UCL) and Northwestern University.

Bahar Noorizadeh is a filmmaker, writer, and platform designer. Her research examines the historical advance of speculative activity and its derivative politics in art, urban life, and finance and economics. Noorizadeh is the founder of Weird Economies, an online art platform that traces economic imaginaries extraordinary to financial arrangements of our time. Her work has appeared at the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennial 2021, Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program, Transmediale Festival, DIS Art platform, Berlinale Forum Expanded, and Geneva Biennale of Moving Images among others. She is pursuing her work as a PhD candidate in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London where she holds a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.

Alaa Mansour is an artist, filmmaker, and archivist based between Marseille and Beirut. Her work focuses on the history of violence and the power of images in the age of necropolitics. Using a multidisciplinary approach she explores concepts of the sacred and the sublime and their potential of horror. She is currently head of visual research for Bidayat, an intellectual and cultural quarterly magazine published in Beirut.

Róisín Tapponi, Bahar Noorizadeh and Alaa Mansour