Free to Choose is an operatic financial sci-fi (fi-fi), narrated by Milton Friedman, in which we encounter the credit banking system as a time-travelling machine.
In 1997, in post-economic crash Hong Kong, Philip Tose, ex-race car driver and CEO of an insolvent company, travels to the future to borrow a lump sum from his older self and rescue his business. Hong Kong in 2047 turns out not to be very different from the Hong Kong of “One Country, Two systems”. Centralisation has not eradicated nepotism, and activism has become rating activism: young people advocating for free time travel for everyone, including the untrustworthy and the discredited of a corrupt credit system.
In the background is superstar economist and real-life evangelist Milton Friedman’s myth of neoliberalism as represented by Hong Kong: in his long career as a market ideologue and advisor to the conservative governments of the US and the UK, Friedman hailed the city as the modern exemplar of free markets, needless of heavy-handed government planning and control. “If you want to see Capitalism in action, you should go to Hong Kong.”
Much like the economic worlds built in metaverse and gaming platforms today, Hong Kong was the testing ground for the parable of neoliberalism. Once certified in its advanced colony, neoliberalism would return to shape the economic policies of Western powers in the decades to come. Despite once claiming the highest rate of public housing in the world, Hong Kong now holds one of the deepest wealth gaps and one of the most lucrative real estate markets on the planet.
About the artist
In her practice as an artist, theorist and filmmaker, Bahar Noorizadeh examines the relationship between art and capitalism. Her work examines the conflictual and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they collapse into one another, investigating the histories and the futures of economics as well as activist strategies against the financialisation of life, asking what redistributive historical justice might look like for the present. Noorizadeh is the founder and organiser of Weird Economies. Her work has appeared at the Guggenheim Museum NYC (2024), Taipei Biennial (2023), Venice Architecture Biennial (2021), Transmediale Festival (2020, 2022), among others. She teaches in MA Geo-Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven and is a resident artist at the Rijksakademie (2026-2027).