Houbara - Resonanzen Iran 2025

In the organizer's words:

03. + 04.06 2025 I 19:00 I 🎤 Concert Hall & JAKI

The third edition of "Houbara - Resonances Iran" takes place at the beginning of June. The 2-day festival sees itself as a place of exchange, new encounters and shared experiences. Houbara is dedicated to artists and ensembles who question genre boundaries, creating and exploring their own worlds of sound. A meeting space for musical explorations, feminist perspectives and cross-border listening experiences - between experiment and tradition, between personal expression and political statement. This year, curator Sophie Emilie Beha and co-curator Mona Matbou Riahi are broadening the focus: It extends to multi-layered, contemporary and boundary-breaking music with references beyond Iran to the countries of the neighboring region. After all, the region known today as Iran is a mosaic of languages, cultures, histories and identities.

The program of the two evenings shows just how broad this spectrum can be:
The 29-year-old singer-songwriter Sanam Maroufkhani kicks things off with her newly formed quartet and wonderfully sensitive songs. The duo Stereotype got to know each other in Tehran's small, isolated, resistant underground scene and are now breaking with every conceivable cliché with violently oscillating synth basslines and noisy syncopated beats. The band HUUUM sees various dialects, dances and melodies as a form of revolution and dresses folklore in futuristic sounds.
The four musicians from Zemiene pick up on this the next day (04.06.) and combine Persian and Scandinavian folk songs. After Ava Rasti transforms the JAKI into never-ending soundscapes of gentle drones, the premiere of the new trio by Aya Metwalli, Rabih Beaini and Julian Sartorius will bring the festival to a high-energy close! A lecture performance by Hanna Grześkiewicz on the role of sound for the feminist revolution in Iran completes the evening.

About the festival title: The houbara is an Iranian endemic migratory bird that is threatened with extinction. The title also refers to "The Conference of the Birds" (منطق الطیر) by Fariduddin Attar - a great mystical poem that is one of the most important works of Persian literature. It describes the pilgrimage of thousands of birds of the world in search of an ideal king. In the end, thirty birds remain - and realize that they themselves are the king they are looking for.

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