In Bahar Noorizadeh and Klara Kofen’s theatrical staging of Admiror, actors give tours of revolutions past. But what if the desire for change is not enough?
In his book If We Burn (2023), journalist Vincent Bevins asks why, after a dozen years of unprecedented global mass uprisings (from the Arab Spring to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong), so little change was achieved. When it came to the inauguration of Trump 2.0, with its proud xenophobia and unvarnished shades of techno-monarchy, we did not see protesters pouring onto the streets at all. And if they had, what difference would it have made?
Liberalism, particularly in twenty-first-century-America style, assumes moral superiority because it couches its political interests in the language of sympathy: we know, we see you, we’re just as angry as you are. This prevailing sentimental structure was dealt its final death blow by the Israel Defense Forces. As the Biden administration held forth on Israeli democracy and the right to self-defence, the world watched Gazans gathering their loved ones’ remains in plastic bags. A genocide unfolding on our smartphones produced something like a state of planetary dissociation. Today, the MAGA era of American empire – now available in dark mode – eschews pretences of virtue and prefers to say the quiet part out loud. Now what?
As Bahar Noorizadeh and Klara Kofen’s characters muse wryly in Admiror, Or Revolutionary Sentiments (2024), “Did you know the liberals designed the first LARP [Live Action Role Play]? They LARPed sympathy with others’ misery.” Initiated at BEK in Oslo and first commissioned for the Guggenheim Museum in New York last year, Admiror is an ambitious, essayistic performance piece unfolding over 45 minutes. Its UK premiere took place at the Invisible Wind Factory in Liverpool, in a programme curated by The Otolith Collective in conjunction with Noorizadeh’s solo exhibition Free To Choose, at FACT. Noorizadeh, an artist best known for essayistic videoworks blending economics and science fiction, has recently embarked on a number of performative collaborations with Kofen, an artist and dramaturg who codirects Waste Paper Opera, a motley crew of experimental musicians, composers and performers (with whom I have also collaborated). In a series of sensual audiovisual movements combining spoken text, electronic music, CGI and dialogic storytelling, Admiror comprises a central video flanked by two performers, Kofen on vocals and the artist-composer Cameron Graham on a sensory percussion drum kit. Noorizadeh herself appears as a 3D avatar, in Unreal Engine scenes animated by Ruda Babau.
Opening with a bronze statue of Christopher Columbus astride a column overlooking a high-tech garden city, Admiror seemingly takes place in a utopian-dystopian microstate, replete with geodesic bio-domes and silvery Anish Kapoor-esque sculptures. Noorizadeh’s and Kofen’s characters engage in a listless but intimate exchange, commenting on the proud beauty of the admiral’s column, the origins of LARP, self-love and narcissism. It appears that they are actors whose job it is to give LARP tours of revolutions past, a conceit reminiscent of the amusement park employees in Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004) or George Saunders’s Pastoralia (2000), service workers consigned to play history on repeat. We could be in the palm islands of Dubai, at the marbled feet of Stamford Raffles in Singapore or neo-Jerusalem: “I was once a revolutionary myself, you know… now I’m LARPing revolution for a living in the Iranian quarter”, Noorizadeh’s character remarks.
‘Admiror’, a Latin word, refers to a baroque gesture indexing awe, worship, astonishment. In early-modern performance, bodily, sentimental and psychological states were conveyed through a common lexicon of gestures, as small as a bend of the wrist. Contemporary sentiment, by contrast, tends to be read through the irreducibility of the individual: “Yes, some of my tour material is also based on personal experience…”, Kofen’s character offers. Through our interlocutors, we learn that Admiral Columbus’s raised arm is a dud gesture, pointing not to the New World but to nowhere in particular. Maybe we are to search for the virgin lands within.
Juxtaposing their ambiguous exchange, sunlit scenes narrated by a cheerful American (played by Nick Houde) tell the story of the libertarian neo-city’s emergence (“And when the whole world was falling apart, we found our own enclave across the internet, with our own laws…”). Graham, silent on his drum kit for much of the show, comes alive as the syncopated driving force behind essayistic sequences on the Haitian revolution, and the question of “how you measure the success of a revolution”. In the latter, Kofen’s coolly energetic delivery carries the melancholic humour of one who has seen too much change, only to stay the same: “You could measure it by the number of people who kept their jobs, because they were sorry.” Graham’s deft sonic textures, at turns brooding and kinetic, keep the mood suspended between restlessness and disenchantment, as if sincerely acknowledging that sincerity is not enough. How many mass movements, how many booms and busts of affective investment in systemic change before dissociation starts to feel like a feature, not a bug?
Work on Admiror began in mid-2023. Kofen has said that partway through the process they were forced to respond to a sense of unreality that followed the irruption of 7 October, a vertiginous effect of being torn incoherently between broadcast media, personal doomscrolling and the frenzied conversations that passed for discourse. Airstrikes turned into ground offensive, and ground offensive turned into genocide, one refresh at a time. What good is sympathy when you expect to see the worst images of human atrocity you have ever seen, live-tweeted by breakfast time?
The chasm between political feelings and political consequences might once have been tenuously bridged. After all, liberal democracy – and its perfected technological form, algorithmic social media – rewards us for expressing our feelings, on the implicit premise that sentiment (properly represented) wills a better world into being. But collective effervescence in the age of ubiquitous communication is less a strike than a storm surge, a climactic event that has little or nothing to do with justice. Reactionaries thrive in the present conditions of fear and anxiety, as they find no incoherence between individual nativist desires and a liveable collective life. Even if coherence is an illusion, it is a hard-won kayfabe, the shared suspension of disbelief that keeps the show on the road. Revolution, on the other hand, is a different kind of performance: gesturing to a world to come, at each instance a rehearsal until it isn’t. But in a world saturated with revolutionary sentiment, what produces a revolutionary fact?
Sociologist Charles Tilly shows that in the fifteenth century, when the peasant masses rose up in protest, they didn’t write placards – they murdered the tax collector. In late 2024 the apparent execution of the healthcare insurance executive Brian Thompson by a young man named Luigi Mangione in broad Manhattan daylight (Mangione has pleaded not guilty to murder and terrorism charges) was met with the kind of awe and adulation once reserved for folk heroes. In an affective politics marked by dissociation (‘I don’t yet know what I’m feeling’) and disavowal (‘I know well, but all the same’), perhaps history sides with Luigi (‘I have a gun’). As one Twitter user recently mused, ‘They should invent a way out that isn’t through.’
Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and writer working between London and Shanghai
