“Admiror, or Revolutionary Sentiments” is a collaborative audiovisual performance by artists Bahar Noorizadeh and Klara Kofen. The work stages five episodic dialogues on the sentimental logic of capitalism and their revolutionary dialectical doubles.

A decade before publishing his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith released his less discussed premise for the ethical foundation of free market economy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. “Moral sentiments”, linked to a feeling of “sympathy”, rested on the imaginative affordances of the spectator. Bound together they formed the emotional order that enabled the operation of free market capitalism.

“Admiror” departs from the imaginative, emotional role-play underpinning modern market relations, and evolves into LARPing ideas around the revolutionary subject and theories of contingency and change. It tracks the transformation of the mechanics of imagination from the body to the market, exploring the dialectics of “structure” according to models derived from European enlightenment and of the “speculative” that artificial intelligence is today aspiring to.

In doing this, the work attempts to understand the affective underbelly of these structures, their inherent mysticism, and desirous qualities. By mapping the process of “rehearsing new models” onto the ever-shortening window afforded us by climate change, “Admiror” tries to articulate new ways for thinking through the subject of revolution.

Commissioned by BEK
World premiere: BEK’s symposium The Only Lasting Truth is Change in Bergen, Norway (2023)