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 (TCS) unfolds as an expanded field — a convergence of sound, moving image, and critical reflection. The 2025 festival traces the moment where art, technology, and displacement intersect, exploring how non-belonging can become an artistic force rather than a state of loss.

TCS 2025 brings together musicians, filmmakers, and interdisciplinary artists from Iran and the diaspora, alongside collaborators from around the world. What binds them is not geography or genre, but a shared impulse to think and feel through unstable forms — to create meaning from fragmentation, transition, and the tension between physical and digital presence.

The festival unfolds across multiple temporal and spatial constellations:
From Cinematic Synesthesia III — a three-part film program developed in collaboration with the Experimental Film Society and Left Bank Cinema — to a multidisciplinary exhibition at Silent Green Betonhalle, and three nights of live performances traversing electronic, electroacoustic, ritualistic and audiovisual forms. Each section functions as a porous zone where media, gestures, and perspectives entangle rather than align.

Amid a cultural economy obsessed with visibility, coherence, and marketable identity, TCS 2025 seeks to reinitiate the Real — to conjure presence within the post-representational. Here, the simulated gives way to the sensorial, and the digital is re-inscribed with affect and breath. The festival stages acts of reimagining: of sound as apparition, image as residue, and technology as the haunted infrastructure of desire and memory.

Rather than offering resolution, TCS 2025 invites friction — a space where error, interference, and misunderstanding become forms of listening and knowing. It is in this fragile openness that a new collective language may emerge: a language that remembers, questions, and dreams the Real back into being.

In this sequence, TCS 2025 reimagines diaspora not as an identity, but as a method: It is an experiment in collective non-belonging — a temporary sonic commons where the displaced, the digital, and the divine resonate as one field of vibration.

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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.

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

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.

For more information click here