Exploring the interplay of sound and healing, Nazanin Noori’s compositions range from installation to poetry. Sampling as a mode of generating narration is found in her atmospheric sound scenarios, which are exclusively aired in radio and often perform a kind of trespassing by bringing disparate cultural traditions and musical genres into conversation with one another. Indicative of this approach, in Noori’s recurrent AMBIENT HARDCORE sound scenario series for Refuge Worldwide, a radio station and community space in Berlin Neukölln, choral arrangements, synthesizers, and doom jazz co-mingle. Her new commission, THE STATE OF BEING MANY (2024), featuring Gülten Firat, Sinem Elçi, and Ôzgür Işik, is a liminal, dark space that is permeated by the voices of three Berlin-based female Kurdish singers, with one horn sculpture serving as the source of the installation’s sound. The oral tradition of narrative storytelling and the preservation of memory through song is embodied by dengbêj, a term that refers to Kurdish folk singers and the tales they recount. Sung in different Kurdish dialects, songs from this tradition, as well as some from the singer’s local communities, highlight moments of loss, displacement, and resistance against oppression. The macro and micro histories these songs recount beautifully illustrate the act of maintaining a language that is formally forbidden by the different countries that currently rule the traditional lands of Kurdistan. These songs are simultaneously interwoven with the deeply intimate and personal expressions of the women as individuals, as a celebration of joys and a mode of processing pain and trauma, inviting listeners to empathize, reflect, and find themselves transported to a different space.

Work in the exhibition: THE STATE OF BEING MANY (2024), sound installation, traverse, pvc tarpaulin, speaker, dimensions vary, 8'. Courtesy of the artist. Sung by: Gülten Firat, Sinem Elçi, Ôzgür Işik; Produced by: Nazanin Noori; Recorded at Callie’s, Berlin, with the support of Andrea Belfi; Mixed by: James Ginzburg