TCS 2025

Tehran Contemporary Sounds is proud to announce the sixth edition of the TCS festival to be happening 23rd to 30th of November 2025 in Silent Green Betonhalle and Movimento Kino.

Curatorial Statement

In its sixth edition, Tehran Contemporary Sounds expands into an organism of sound, image, and sustained encounter. Throughout November, TCS stages 15 live performances, three days of experimental screenings, a collaborative masterclass, and a three-day exhibition in two parts — a festival that treats rupture as method and non-belonging as practice.

Amid a cultural economy obsessed with visibility, coherence, and marketable identity, TCS 2025 turns deliberately toward the fracture. Rather than performing “Iranian identity” in its symbolic and consumable form, the festival unsettles it — allowing the instability of identity to become a generative condition. Here, non-belonging offers not a story but a working principle: a way of operating within the horror and freedom of being unmoored.

Within this charged field, TCS reopens the question of the Real — not as a hidden essence, but as the point where representation falters and the simulated gives way to sensation. When sound becomes apparition and image becomes residue, the digital is re-inscribed with breath, affect, and unresolved memory.

The works gathered in TCS 2025 do not aim for coherence or resolution. They open porous zones: concerts as laboratories, screenings as crystalline memory, exhibitions as haunted infrastructures. In these interferences and disruptions, the Real flickers — not as authenticity, but as intensity and encounter.

TCS does not attempt to map a community; instead, it composes a temporary commons where the displaced, the digital, and the material resonate without settling into identity. A field of unstable intensities, where worlds are made and unmade in real time.

Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds & Goethe Institut im Exil, and fuelled by existential dread — TCS 2025 invites you to listen hard, mishear purposefully, and inhabit the productive disorientation of non-identity.

---

1-Performances: 28-30 November 2025
Silent Green Betonhalle

TCS 2025 – AV Performances | 28.–30. November

During three intense evenings, Tehran Contemporary Sounds presents a slate of 15 live/AV performances that fuse visual abstraction, sonic experimentation and embodied expression. From intimate gestures to expansive soundscapes, these works negotiate identity, memory, resistance—and the thresholds where image and sound merge.

Featured artists include 9T Antiope, Anousha Nazari & Antoine Morinière, Atena Eshtiaghi, Amir Torangan × Gaetha (and Decayed), Fløi Zāprūz, Gisou Golshani, Hjirok, Kimia Koochakzadeh, Navid Afghah, Quartet Diminished, Saba Alizadeh & FARZANE (World Premiere), Scream Manifesto, Sadaf H Nava, and the enigmatic The Sleep of Reason Creates Monsters (aka The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters).

Across the festival nights, each performance approaches the image-sound boundary differently—some weaving cinematic fragments, others sculpting audio-visual atmospheres through live processing, spatialization, and durational shifts.

Whether through quietly rendered motions or bold sonic gestures, the program invites the audience into moments of suspended attention—spaces where listening and seeing fold into each other.

Join us for three evenings of experimental, boundary-pushing work that brings new voices from the Iranian and diasporic artscape into proximity with audiences in Berlin.

2-Film Screenings: 23, 25, 26 – November 2025
Kino Moviemento

EFS x TCS Presents: Cinematic Synesthesia III

Now in its third year, Cinematic Synesthesia—a visionary collaboration between Tehran Contemporary Sounds (TCS), the Experimental Film Society (EFS), and EFS Film School—
returns in 2025 as an expanded, boundary-dissolving symposium of avant-garde cinema.
Launched in 2023, this year’s iteration transcends conventional curation, framing cinema as a living archaeology of the present: a medium that excavates the ephemeral now to construct future mythologies. The project rejects static historicity, instead positing film as a re-inscription where
past, present, and future coexist in a “crystal-image.” Here, cinema becomes a fossilised consciousness, with films functioning not as relics but as psychic strata, subverting traditional narratives through visceral, forward-leaning creation.
Across three curatorial constellations—two drawn from Rashidi’s ongoing excavation into contemporary personal filmmaking and a third produced collectively in the masterclass—participants will encounter films that blur the membrane between apparatus and organism, vision and vibration, presence and ruin.

4-TCS Exhibition: 28, 29, 30 November 2025
Silent Green Betonhalle

Departure from noise عزیمت از نویز 
Curated by Amirali Ghasemi
Room For Doubt in collaboration with Parking Video Library

Departure from Noise takes on the critical standpoint regarding what contemporary sound can mean. In the time we live in, noise acts as a double-edged sword; it can rebel against the norms by non-conforming to existing or upcoming power structures, or it can suffocate the voices of the less-heard and peripheral actors.  The exhibition benefits from actions and imaginaries from various artists, archivists, storytellers, and sound makers. As the context and title suggest, trajectories of sound offer pillars holding a temporary space at betonhalle in late november 2025.

REMNANTS
Curated by Shahin Peymani
In collaboration with Rabt, Khamoosh, School of Sonic Arts, SALT, Sounds of Tehran

Remnants brings together installations and media works exploring sound as material, memory, and vibration. The exhibition focuses on how sound inhabits space, acts on perception, and reveals the structures that hold it. These works approach listening not as representation but as encounter — tracing sound as residue, presence, and shifting form.

For more information click here

3-Cinema Masterclass: 15, 16 – November 2025

This two-day masterclass is a collaborative initiative between EFS Film School (Experimental
Film Society) and the Tehran Contemporary Sounds (TCS) festival. Adapted from Rouzbeh
Rashidi’s acclaimed five-day course, it offers an intensive, immersive engagement with experimental and personal cinema. Participants will examine the history of alternative
film/video, explore diverse artistic practices, and develop innovative methods to initiate or expand their own experimental film work.
Through curated screenings, poetic lectures, group discussions, and critical readings, participants will encounter filmmakers and artists who have expanded the boundaries of moving images and redefined the possibilities of cinema. The programme analyses seminal works and techniques—focusing on both image-making and sound design—to illustrate the creation of lyrical, idiosyncratic, and radical films. These insights provide a stimulating foundation for the collaborative production of new work.
The masterclass emphasises personal and lyrical expression, treating the moving image as a medium of “memory” and “perception,” continuously reframed by lived experience. Eschewing conventional technical instruction, it privileges intuitive and philosophical approaches to filmmaking. Over the two days, participants will absorb the ethos of experimental cinema and immediately apply these concepts in practice through the creation of a collaborative film.

For more information and application click here