Sunday 12 May 2024, 7.30pm
The night will begin with a panel discussion about the concept of the Archive of Listening, aiming to exchange listening experiences and practices with other archive platforms. The panel will feature Mark Gergis, Yamen Mekdad (Syrian Cassette Archives), Christina Hazboun (Christina Hazboun, Founder of The Sonic Agent from Palestine) and Hardi Kurda (Archive Khanah founder from Kurdistan), moderated by Rim Irscheid (Beyond 1932, King’s College London).
We will continue with two sets of performances, creating spontaneous improv groups from our wide collaborative pool: Khabat Abas, Hasan Hujairi, Adam Denton, Ernst Marechal, and George Moraitis.
Performers will bring and incorporate their personal & historical sound archives spanning modern-day field recordings from the streets of Slemani in Kurdistan, Brussels, Syria, Belfast, Palestine, London, Greece, and Sharjah, as well as historical materials from the 1930s to 1970s recorded in Kurdistan and Iraq.
Archive Khanah is part of SPACE21 projects Supported by AFAC (Arab Fund for culture and art) and British Council Northern Ireland
Hasan Hujairi (b. 1982) is a Bahraini artist, composer, and writer. His work often explores the notion of the outsider, confronting (historiographic) superstructures, and the nature of constructing narratives within time. He holds a DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts) in music composition from Seoul National University (Seoul, South Korea), where he researched reorienting the narrative associated with the maverick composer tradition to be more inclusive of composers working outside the Western classical music tradition. He also holds a Masters of Economics from Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo, Japan) in economic history and regional economics, and wrote his thesis on the significance of conceiving the Gulf region in both its littorals within a Braudelian historiographic framework. As of January 2023, he joined the Sharjah Art Foundation as manager of the music department.
Dr. Hardi Kurda is a sound artist, improviser, and researcher with a PhD in Music from Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the founder of SPACE21, a platform for sound art and experimental music in Slemani, and Archive Khanah, an interactive sound archive project inspired by the philosophy of computer gaming, featuring coloured cassettes and recorded sounds from Kurdistan and Iraq.
Hardi's work explores radio noise and sonic traces often considered illegal, abandoned, unheard, invisible, broken, distorted, or forgotten — sounds without a place or destination. He developed the concept of “The Found Score”, which is an Urgent Listening method that navigates attention toward non-auditory senses. His listening’s approach rooted in his personal experience of migration and crisis during an illegal journey to Europe.
Khabat Abas is an experimental cellist, improviser, and composer from Iraqi Kurdistan. She moves freely between artistic discipline and possibilities. Her works are inspired by a broad collection of methods, including noise, improvisation, and narrative storytelling as individual approaches. Therefore, she searches for unheard sounds or undiscovered spaces. Khabat is probably best known for her adapted cello and improvisational work exploring extended techniques, through which she started developing pieces that respond to the objects that are surrounding her or to her childhood memories. In her practice, she raises questions about what is out of bounds, raising the possibilities of sounds that cannot be controlled – in contrast to traditional musical values.
Syrian Cassette Archives is an initiative aiming to preserve, share and research sounds and stories from the cassette era (1970s-2000s) in Syria. The collection of tapes presents a wide-ranging overview of musical styles from Syriaʼs many communities, including Syrian Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds and Armenians, as well as Iraqis displaced by sanctions and wars throughout the 1990s-2000s. The archive is home to tape recordings of live concerts, studio albums, soloists, classical, religious, patriotic and childrenʼs music, with a special focus on the regional dabke and shaabi folk-pop music, performed and recorded at weddings, parties and festivities.
Yamen Mekdad is a Syrian artist, filmmaker and community organiser based in London. His practice is an experimentation in radical collaboration with a focus on the relationship between sound and geography as well as the political possibility of sound. His interests in field recording, archiving, radio and grassroots organising led him to co-found the collectives Sawt of the Earth, Makkam and Sadaa Sound Syndicate. He is a frequent contributor to a number of radio stations, including Root, Balami, NTS and AlHara. Yamen is also curator and producer of Syrian Cassette Archives, the Syrian Arts and Culture Festival (SACF) and Sawt Syria a Boiler Room & Sadaa Sound Syndicate collaboration, exploring the inner worlds of the underground music scene in Syria and its exilic diaspora in Europe.
Adam Denton [https://linktr.ee/zonal_markings] is a sonic artist/performer working across media and materials. He has worked on projects such as The Old Police House (TOPH), a place for exploratory sonic art in Newcastle, alongside Mariam Rezaei, and the Abandonment project with Hardi Kurda & Space21 Festival, exploring so-called abandoned spaces in Slemani, Kurdistan region of Iraq. He is a member of No Hevdem, a new multi-locational collective of artists working with archive and live performance.
Christina Hazboun is a sonic agent. Her multifarious adventures through music and sound manifest through a web of activities aimed at amplifying the voices of the underheard from the SWANA and the global majority via texts, poetry, radio/sound collages, talks and curation.
Rim Irscheid is an ethnomusicologist, curator and textile artist working with hand embroidery, field recordings and found materials. Combining ethnographic research, curatorial practice and arts-based methods, her work looks at artist-led institution building, emotional aspects of creative labour and interpretations of care in curatorial activism. Some of her research-based articles and essays can be found in Sonic Matter, field notes Berlin and Norient. Her mixed media installations address sensory aspects of memory making and ambivalent feelings towards ‘home’ and have been exhibited at Cafe OTO, Modern Art Oxford and London Design Festival.
George Moraitis [www.georgemoraitis.gr] is an Athens-based multimedia artist. His practice investigates the space between sound sculpture, audiovisual installations, two-dimensional works and performance. His multi-layered works incorporate sound and found objects which are often accompanied by video, photography, screen prints, performance and computer-controlled interactive installations. Sound takes the form of acoustic and psychoacoustic explorations of the body, sculpture and vision in intersections of the peculiarities of perception, materiality and technology. Working with sound, installations and performance, he proposes narratives aiming to disrupt memory, experience and a sense of history, expressing the underlying tensions within our contemporary mode of living: the multiplicity and fragmentation of its languages.
Ernst Maréchal is an audiovisual artist, performer and songwriter. With a love for beat, sound and voice, he explores the borderland between the political and the poetic. He seeks to understand, imagine and address issues of inequality, diversity and commonality. With Social Recordings, he is involved in an ongoing dialogue, engaging different people, places and memories to resonate in non-linear moments of encounter.
