Bloc Billboard: Bijan Moosavi
30 September 2024 - 6 January 2025
Free & Open to All
We were overwhelmed by the many exciting proposals submitted to this year’s Bloc Members Billboard call out. Thank you for your support and enthusiasm.
After much deliberation, we selected Art World Perfumes, a piece by artist Bijan Moosavi that aligns with his speculative practice in which the cultural spaces and objects of terminally neoliberal times are brought to life.
Playfully exploring the billboard’s advertising potential of a near-future art world, the artist whimsically parodies perfume commercials, 1980’s sci-fi film palettes and London-centric art students to declare that “you, too, can smell like art world success” — as long as you can afford it. Each fragrance is attached to one of the most expensive art schools in the UK, endowing the wearer with its associated vapours of institutional reputation and exclusivity. A droll observation on the marketisation of education and elitism in contemporary art, Bijan invites us to consider what the inaccessibility of art education and privileges mean in late capitalist times.
The billboard is accompanied by a fictional podcast from the future called Art Deal. The podcast features an in-depth discussion with the CEO of InnovArte Global, a leading multinational conglomerate that controls the majority of UK art universities in the 2040s. The conversation explores the mystical powers of these perfumes, marketing them as guaranteed facilitators of success in the art world. You can listen via the link above or in situ via a QR code.
Bijan Moosavi بیژن موسوی is an Iranian multimedia artist based in London. He makes films, installations, music and performances which look at the impact of neoliberalism from a Middle Eastern point of view. Bijan’s work draws upon the aesthetics of neoliberalism (corporate advertising, sci-fi movies, popular culture, Islamic kitsch, etc.) in order to tell dystopian tales from speculative futures drowned in deep neoliberalism. Some recent works: a climate refugee center from the year 2058 (GHT.2058: Asylo-Janaat, 2023); a deeply neoliberal nightclub from the future in the Middle East (Disco Islam: Future Phantasmagoria, 2022); a performance in the style of YouTube Reaction videos (Disco Islam: Commentary Performance, 2022); and a business pitch (Disco Islam: How To Make A Cultural Investment In Middle East, 2019).