Part 1 – Departure from noise عزیمت از نویز
28th – 30th November, Betonhalle Silent Green
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 eight 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.
Departure from noise invites visitors to try three pathways to overlapping territories:
To the realm of stories with Leila Ahmadi Abadeh & Nebras Hoveizavi, Language Prison with Chupan Atashi, Sin Seeni & Aida Khorsandi and finally Emancipation with Sarvenaz Mostofy, Erfan Abdi and Mahoor Mirshakkak.
While erased bodies become tainted with narratives from borders to the recurring process of denial and elimination in “realm of stories” as the first chapter , in the second setting “Language Prison”, three strategies appear to enhance imaginary/auditory escape routes, sharing coping mechanisms where words are not enough. Ephemeral moments of “Emancipation”, follow the path to the last chapter where letting go, remembrance and care meet.
Program:
Friday Nov. 28
Exhibition opening – Reception & Brief Tour with curator
Saturday Nov. 29
Tactile Utterance, Performance by Aida Khorsandi – Duration 45 min
Sunday Nov. 30
Calling Out Durational Performance by Erfan Abdi –
Exhibition Tour & Discussion with Artists Erfan Abdi, Aida Khorsandi, Sin Seeni, Sarvenaz Mostofey & curator Amirali Ghasemi
Screening / Kino A Moment of Exposure by Mahshid Afzali & Mahoor Mirshakkak – 20 min
Area one:
“To the realm of Stories”
به سرزمین قصهها
With: Leila Ahmadi Abadeh & Nebras Hoveizavi
Nebras Hoveizavi’s Border Run chooses recorded voices to activate storytelling and as evidence of displacement, hesitant pauses between borders. Leila Ahmadi Abadeh’s unofficial centers around an audio instruction to guide us through societal othering and xenophobia in an unnamed city that unfolds via an interactive object theater made for one person/witness at a time.
Leila Ahmadi Abadeh
Unofficial
2020-2025
Interactive Installation
Leila Ahmadi Abadeh’s Unofficial revolves around an audio instruction that guides us through the experience of social exclusion and xenophobia in an unnamed city. This experience unfolds through an interactive object theater designed for one person/witness at a time. The objects in the performance are randomly selected from broken children’s toys, and the script of the play is written based on them.
The performance was first staged in 2020 under the title “Moving Story” as part of Motevali, Multimedia Performances at Vali Gallery in Tehran, and later presented in the current format, as “Unofficial in 2022 at Transient Works Laboratory in collaboration with Suite 42 in Tehran. Each time, through direct feedback from the audience due to the individual nature of the experience, the performance has been refined and enriched.
The work raises this question: How does violence persist and spread in a city where official teachers are absent, and silence has replaced truth? A place where there is no cultural option but fanaticism, and no pastime except joining a team, whether large or small! One might say these stories are fictional, but they are drawn from a kind of history we have all grown up with across the world—a history that has never been written anywhere and perhaps never will be. (With the hope that it will be.)
Nebras Hoveizavi
Border Run (Film)
25:00
2025
Border Run is a 25-minute experimental, hybrid documentary pieced together from WhatsApp voice notes, classroom recordings, performances, and documentary footage. Following an art teacher working without legal status in an unnamed West Asian country, the film unfolds in fragments that mix testimony, lesson-plan-inspired gestures, and on-screen statements. Layer by layer, it reveals the precarious realities of displacement, borders, and survival. Both intimate and constructed, the film assembles these fragments into a meditation on legality and the fragile right to exist.
Area Two:
Language prison
زندان زبان
With: Chupan Atashi, Sin Seeni, Aida Khorsandi
In the light of departure from noise, the second stop is “The language Prison”. Works chosen in this area of the exhibition reflect on the ambiguity shadowing language and its relation to sound. There are weary bridges between this area and the one before, literature shape-shifting into something visually perceivable, departing from the sonic interpretations of the language to a sensory experience.
Chupan Atashi’s Gulistan is one of their earlier video pieces, which take on the introduction of Sa’di’s Gulistan (The Rose Garden, 1258), which is a classic work of Iranian literature. While Sa’di introduces his writing as a method for capturing fleeting beauty and rendering it eternal within the pages of a book. While atashi’s presence in front of the camera while delivering the barely memorised text offers an escape together with the caged literary creature, where the technicality of capture fails, doors open.
In Sin Seeni’s The Invisible Tablet the transition is made through translation machines at work to transport us from a classic text, here a Poem by Hafez to a living color spectrum corresponding with a sophisticated code system and from there to an Auditory output.
Tangible Utterance, Aida Khorsandi’s Lecture performance is an attempt at an academic prison-break, where research translates itself into an urgent haptic aurality: Where the noise is present, what is absent and vice versa? Can this break also happen through an activation, metamorphosis
While these unusual mediators create an atmospheric journey toward the third area, their fresh adaptation remains obscure yet crisp experiences of being confined, desire to break free and try & errors in order to achieve it.
Sin Seeni
The Invisible Tablet
2025
3D model of the installation – Invisible Tablet
The Invisible Tablet, alludes to the hidden layer of aesthetic experience within Hafez’s ghazals. This aesthetic dimension is linguistically untranslatable and can only be truly apprehended through the illuminating power of art. The project serves as a form of phonography and a method for extracting the inherent music of Persian rhythmic poetry, approached through a formalist lens that prioritizes poetry and its language as a multimedia art form.
Chupan Atashi
Gulistan
2011
Chupan Atashi – Gulistan – Stillframe – 6:41 – 2011
Aida Khorsandi
Tactile Utterance: Lecture-Performance on Haptic Interfaces for Expressivity
This lecture-performance presents ongoing doctoral research into the design and performance of new digital musical instruments (DMIs) with attention to the performer’s tactile and gestural interaction with the instrument. Grounded in Soma design, the project emphasizes participatory approaches, embodied musicking, and material engagement as pathways to more expressive and critically attuned musical practices.
The presentation interweaves performance with scholarly reflection, demonstrating how tactile and pliable materials can become sites for sonic exploration. The lecture foregrounds the somatic and gestural dimensions of music-making that are often overlooked in technologically driven context. The aim is to de-automize the tools for expressions, reintroduce constraint and inhibition, and to dignify embodied expression.
Drawing from material semiotics, Somaesthetics, and sound studies, this research situates instrument design as a relational and situated practice. Rather than framing new interfaces as purely technical achievements, this research positions them as cultural artifacts and epistemic tools shaped by human expression through haptics and sonic engagements.
Area Three:
Emancipation
رهایی
With: Erfan Abdi, Mahoor Mirshakkak & Sarvenaz Mostofey
The roaming performance “Calling Out”, a Erfan Abdi plays a portable setup of his sonic invention “Notesaaz” while walking along the long ramp at the entrance of the Betonhalle, echoing the cries of a ghost like creature blowing in the lounges of memory and projecting on the cold solid concrete walls and floors of the former crematorium.
Mahoor Mirshakkak’s installation, Safe & Sound on the other hand is a place to settle for rest while deja vu is at work, where recordings hanging each by a thread still keeps our feet on the ground while our head is in the ephemeral clouds of emancipation.
Sarvenaz Mosofey’s The drummer on the roof is a key to bring back the attention to a breaking point: an after and a before in which divides the known timeline: Nothing is going to be the same again after the incident.
Sarvenaz Mostofey
Drummer on the roof
2021, 12:13 min.
Drums by Amin Taheri
Visuals by Daniella Domingues
It starts with the story of a person frustrated by noise, who applies an acoustic resistance
through sound to subvert it. The sound piece combines a maze of ideas and memories, guiding the narrator of the story and the player of the character as if they were a cyborg contemplating the realities of social fiction. The story takes place on a very cold night in the winter of 2017, and deals with a working-class family living in a small city in the north of Iran. Their house is located by the Caspian Sea, basically the last one before the seashore. The family rents the upper floor of a two-story building. On the ground floor, there is a gym dedicated to martial arts, mainly karate. Every night, until late, the sounds of Hiyah!, Aiyah!, Eeee-yah!, or Hyah! of more than twenty men resonated throughout the building and the neighborhood. On some nights, its volume exceeded the sound of the rough sea.
On this particular night, the father, who might also be the daughter or any other family member, climbs onto the roof and hits it with an unidentified object as harsh, as hard, and as loud as one can imagine against all the Hi-yah!, Aiyah!, Eeee-yah!, or Hyah that has been experienced in life. Some of the neighbors who witnessed the event describe the drumming so loud they could hear the sound of the sea. What was the drummer trying to convey as a message, and did he succeed in silencing the din? The story is about the recording of this live drumming. The composition reenacts the sounds of contrasting forces within. The Kiai, the sea
roar, the roof drum, and the songs lost in time.
Drummer on the Roof was part of REUSE >> REFUSE, “an audiovisual series published in
September 2021, bringing the dimension of sound into the discourse on refusal. The series
invited four artists from the NTS Radio, depart.one (SHAPE platform), and Akademie Schloss
Solitude networks to activate the disregarded, unproductive, and leftover in order to assert the value of what is often seen as waste.”
Erfan Abdi
Calling Out
Durational Piece – Mobile Performance
2025
There is a ghost roaming around in the crematorium. One that seeks witness to an injustice taking place right in front of everyone. It cries injustice; while no one seems to hear, everyone knows. But as it is in a crematorium, the living stay silent in honor of the dead, and the dead won’t say a word. And so all bodies are silent. But the ghost never had a body, yet has witnessed thousands of them being burned to a crisp. One can hear the ghost calling the universe out on this injustice. In this “Calling Out”, a performer plays a wearable setup of Notesaaz while walking along the long ramp at the entrance of the Betonhalle, echoing the cries of this ghost and projecting on the cold solid concrete walls and floors of the crematorium.
Notesaaz is an instrument for live electronic music, and a proposal for a three-stage process where the physical controller is used to navigate within a graphical score that on its turn controls the sound generation. By showing the dynamic score to the performer and the audience, Notesaaz suggests new possibilities for staging the performer-instrument relationship, inviting the audience to engage more in what is played and to anticipate what happens next.
Mahoor Mirshakkak
Safe & Sound – امن و امان
Mahoor Mirshakkak’s work often explores themes of memory, history, and the lingering psychological effects of war on contemporary Iranian society. She frequently uses multi-sensory installations, combining text, sound, and video. The sound-centric approach in “SAFE & SOUND” is a definitive example of her method: using auditory cues as a primary archival and emotional tool to explore how history and trauma are felt and remembered on a sensory level, rather than just learned intellectually.
In essence, the sound installation in “SAFE & SOUND” is an immersive, sonic archive of memory and trauma. It juxtaposes the familiar with the horrific to critically examine the psychological concept of safety in a world where the sounds of past conflicts continue to resonate powerfully in the present.
Part 2 – Remnants
28th – 30th November, Betonhalle Silent Green
Curated by Shaahin Peymani
Remnants present a number of current practices, collectives, and spaces active in
the field of sound arts and contemporary music in Iran, offering a glimpse into the
evolving discourse around listening, materiality, and sonic perception. Selected
works share a mutual sensitivity toward sound as an entity that acts, transforms,
and resists reduction to mere representation.
The installations foreground the physicality of sound and its medium, emphasizing
its capacity to inhabit space, vibrate through matter, and expose the mechanisms of
its own transmission. The audio and audiovisual works extend this reflection by
engaging with the affective and mnemonic dimensions of listening and how sound
can evoke, distort, or reconstruct traces of sensory experiences. Together, these
remnants form a composite understanding of sound as vibrant matter, a hidden
object, and a condition through which perception itself can shift. The exhibition
gathers these artistic gestures not as a fixed vocabulary of sonic practice but to
showcase the diverse ways sound continues to act, resonate, and insist within the
contemporary artistic landscape.
Fill in the Blanks (2025)
Fatemeh Barzkar
Interactive Sound Installation with Keys, Coils, Amplifiers, and Headphones
In this installation, visitors are invited to wear headphones, enter the room, and move coil-
mallets over keys, discovering the diverse spaces associated with each key.
The sound is transmitted through electromagnetic fields using coils and amplifiers.
Fatemeh Barzkar, born in 1996 in Tehran, is a sound artist and piano teacher. She has a conceptual approach towards sound and silence and explores the function of imagination regarding sound and other sensory elements. She has a bachelor’s degree in handicrafts and aims to bind her diverse experience in working with different materials and media with her ideas to create sound art.
Pressure of Being Heard (2025)
Maryam Katan
Installation – Still Image, Video Loop
Pressure of Being Heard investigates the visual and material dimensions of sound reproduction. It presents disassembled structures of a loudspeaker, an apparatus designed for over-amplification. Detaching the speaker from its functional capacity, turns it into an anatomical and political entity, exposing the mechanisms of audibility and representation. Once a tool for public address, the loudspeaker has become an instrument of domination, defining new borders of audibility and control. The work reflects on a culture of over-amplification emerging from the evolution of loudspeaker technologies, where increasing Sound Pressure Levels (SPL) have shaped both markets and modes of collective listening. It also traces the tension that arises from the expectation of being audible, a vibration suspended between protest and paralysis, between body and medium. The ultimate “Partybox” loudspeaker is dissected as a totem of excess, A product that involves an
incessant desire for loudness, visibility and dominance.
Maryam Katan (b. 1989, Tehran) is a filmmaker and visual artist based between Berlin and Tehran, working across animation, film, expanded cinema, and live audiovisual performance. Her works explore displacement and the repositioning of meaning outside dominant discourses, seeking alternative cognitive models and decolonial approaches to knowledge systems.
She holds an MFA in Animation Directing from Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran and pursued further studies in audiovisual arts at KASK School of Arts, Belgium. She is a co-founder of the collective Animation; Experiment and a facilitator at Rabt Nomadic Space, engaging with community-based sonic practices.
Her works have been exhibited and screened internationally, including in Berlin, Vienna, London, Istanbul, and Tehran, through festivals, exhibitions, and collaborative research platforms.
Expansion (2025)
Guess Lou
Installation – 2,507 data lines for 4 synthesizers
The story of the creation of the present era, which speaks in the language of science, begins as follows: The universe was born from an extremely hot and dense state about 13.8 billion years ago. In the beginning, all matter and energy were concentrated in a tiny, incredibly compact point. Then this point began to expand rapidly, and space, time, matter, and energy came into being. The period attributed to this expansion, because it precedes time itself, cannot be measured; it is usually only described as “very fast” or “within a fraction of a second.” Time itself is one of the tools of measurement, always estimated, stretched from one point to another. It gives rise to before and after. Our galactic knowledge, in modeling the origin of the universe in which it exists, is sufficient for this “very fast.”
In this work, the data we possess from the early universe (resulting from that rapid expansion) are represented over the duration of 24 Earth hours. And at this very moment, the universe continues to expand.
Nargues Mostafallou, also known as Guess Lou, is a sound artist and electronic musician based in Iran.
She explores the experimental intersections of sound and ecology, capturing the essence of natural environments and ambiance through generative systems, ecoacoustics, field recording, and sound synthesis.
Her practice focuses on creating connections between sonic materials and the natural patterns that shape our soundscapes.
Her works have been broadcast on WaveFarm Radio, Camp.FR Radio, Radio alHara, and Bauhaus.fm, and have been presented at an electroacoustic festival in Iran and at Mutek Dubai.
Beyond The Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response II (2022)
Arshia Samsaminia
Composition for Fixed Media and Solo Saxophone
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) refers to a tingling, static-like sensation that can spread from the scalp and neck to other parts of the body when triggered by specific auditory or visual stimuli.
The work investigates intimacy, subtle friction, and micro–sensory perception, inviting the listener into a heightened state of attention.
One of the central challenges in the compositional process was to blur the boundaries between the saxophone and the fixed media to achieve a sonic environment in which the two materials interweave and dissolve into one another, becoming perceptually inseparable. The result is an immersive interplay between organic breath and engineered resonance, hovering at the edge of tactile sound.
Performer: Fvnn Großmann
Recorded at HMTM Studio, 2022, Hanover, Germany
Arshia Samsaminia is an Iranian contemporary composer, Ph.D. candidate at the Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki, and co-founder and composition mentor at the Tehran School of Sonic Arts. He studied composition at institutions including the Sibelius Academy, University of Gothenburg, University of the Arts Berlin, the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, and Tbilisi State Conservatoire.
He is the recipient of the Fromm Foundation Composer Fellowship 2025 supported by Harvard University. His recent achievements include guest lecturing at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, serving on the Artistic Committee of the Sound and Music Computing Festival in Porto, and winning first prize at the Remus Georgescu International Composing Competition (2024). His works have been performed by ensembles such as Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Musikfabrik, and the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, and featured at festivals including Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Gaudeamus Festival, and Musica Nova Helsinki.
What is Left to Listen to Now? (2025 – ongoing)
Golnoosh Heshmati
Fixed Media – Video and Sound
Listening to the whirring, crackling, and igniting within the structures we inhabit reveals the interconnections between moments, tracing relentless attempts and failed promises that haunt us and the ghosts we have become. How do these ghosts move, vibrate, and echo through time and space? Through critical listening, how can we unite echoes of change within ourselves and the structures that shape our existence? This work is part of an ongoing process that has evolved through listening to, unlearning from, and recording the everyday remnants of a building in Tehran.
This sound piece and video work derive from a brief yet continuous moment of conversation that transforms into a script, while the sound installation is composed of the everyday sounds that the building’s structure holds and carries within itself. The script features two characters who unfold in a dialogue engaged in a continuous discourse on the act of repair.
The project began with a desire to explore the nuances of change through time, material, and thought, how it manifests in the building’s structure and extends to the community it holds within. It constantly circles back to the question of where one stands in the ongoing relationship between expectations, promises, and the failures we encounter while seeking the hauntedness that prevails upon the bodies, whether human or that of the building itself.
Golnoosh Heshmati is an artist, researcher, and curator based between Rotterdam and Tehran. Her practice merges artistic and curatorial approaches, focusing on creating dialogues within the fragmented archives of everyday life through listening, text, sound, ceramics, and performance.
She co-founded Rabt, a nomadic space dedicated to community engagement focusing on sonic practices, and is a member of Khamoosh, an artistic research community that mediates conservation and restoration by exploring the sonic heritage of Iran. Recent collaborations include programs with Rewire Festival, the Nieuwe Instituut, Varia, The Listening Academy, and MaMA Rotterdam.
Blue Pixels (2025)
Maral Mohammadi
Fixed Media – Video and Sound
On June 15, 2025, two days after Israel’s first attack on Iran, the spark of the war, low- resolution videos appeared online: groups of men in identical blue clothing running along one of Tehran’s exit roads. Filmed by civilians escaping the city, the footage was quickly captioned with labels like “insane,” “prisoners,” “addicts,” “escapees.” No reference appeared in official reports. Only uncertain numbers (hundreds, maybe more) were moving on foot toward a city; others were already fleeing.
Blue Pixels gathers and reworks these poor images not to retell the event, but to question how images in times of crisis are seen, circulated, and judged. The project uses montage and distortion as a mirrored surface, where the act of looking becomes unstable. Who decides what is seen? Who becomes the image? And who has the power to name it?
Rooted in Hito Steyerl’s concept of the poor image, a degraded file traveling through informal networks, losing resolution, and with it, the clarity of truth, while accumulating political and emotional weight, the work explores how such images become collective memory, rumor, and violence: as the viewer, feeling violated, becomes the very source of the violent gaze. Where the image becomes both evidence and misunderstanding. Witness and weapon.
Maral Mohammadi (b. 1993, Tehran) is a documentary artist and filmmaker based in Iran. Her work begins with personal archives, family VHS tapes, photographs, medical images and extends to public and found footage, especially poor images circulating online.
She uses these fragile materials to explore memory, disappearance, and the ways images can both reveal and distort reality. Her practice often revisits moments that were never fully seen or understood, working with false memories, degraded images, and fragments of everyday life to rebuild new forms of narrative.
Through essayistic films and visual experiments, she investigates how personal histories intersect with collective trauma, and how the act of looking can become a form of resistance, remembrance, or misinterpretation.