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Golnar Shahyar is a vocalist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, lyricist, music educator, and activist based in Vienna and Berlin. Her work introduces a new approach to the art of songwriting, improvisation, vocalisation, and composition with many integrated elements from the rich musical cultures of East Asia, northwest Africa, Contemporary jazz, European contemporary, electroacoustic, and chamber music. Her singing practices are integrative to a wide range of human vocal and emotional spectrum. She is not only at home in the microtonal music traditions of the MENA region but also finds new terrains by her contemporary interpretations of those traditions. Shahyar s music, educational approach, and activism both challenge and offer opportunities on how we practice, perceive and reproduce music. Shahyar has a bachelor in Biology from York University as well as a bachelor in vocal studies/music pedagogy and guitar performance from the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.
Shahyar is the bandleader and lead singer of her previous bands SORMEH (Austrian World Music Nominee, European World Music Charts, NASOM selection), CHOUB (NASOM selection), SEHRANG as well as her currently active bands GABBEH, GOLNAR & MAHAN TRIO (WOMEX 2020 Selection, NASOM selection) and GolNar. Her dedication to continually creating new cultural and musical dialog in her work brought her many collaborations with various internationally renowned musicians such as Erkan Ogur and Alain Perez, both on stage and in music productions as well as solo performances with ORF Radio Symphonie Orchestra, TONKÜNSTLER-ORCHESTER and Trickster Orchestra.
Being for more than a decade in the field of performance, music production, and education, Shahyar has proved to be a multifaceted musician who has put quality, dialog, personal expression, storytelling, and advocacy at the core of her artistic work.
Horacio Curti studied the shakuhachi in Japan where he got his shakuhachi shihan, master’s degree. He later completed a PhD thesis with the title ‘Aesthetics of sound in Japanese hōgaku. Ethnomusicology and Artistic Research in dialogue.' He works on artistic research with a focus on the transdisciplinary and the audio-visual as a tool to create and communicate knowledge. He has performed and taught in North and South America, Europe and Japan and currently is associate professor at Catalonia College of Music (Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya) in Barcelona. His activities had included performing as soloist with the Spanish National Orchestra, the edition of the book “Eolssigu”, the publication of two solo albums, the curation of the yearlong exhibition on South Korean musical practices and the production (with Ariadna Pujol) of over a dozen audio-visual pieces including ‘Eolssigu’ which got best short film prize at Kathmandu 8th International Folk Music Festival.
Website: http://www.shakuhachi.es/en/homepage.html
Summary reel of his artistic projects: https://youtu.be/5cGqx81CQHU
Nina Kusturica is a film and theatre director. She works as an artistic investigator of the artistic research project „Confrontig Realities“ at the Film academy Vienna.
She has released numerous feature and documentary films for cinema; Ciao Chérie (2017), Little Alien (2009), Auswege (2003), 24 Wirklichkeiten in der Sekunde – Michael Haneke im Film (2004), Draga Ljiljana (2000) as well as the short films Der Freiheit (2001) and Wishes (1999). Her films participated and won awards at numerous film festivals, which include: the Berlinale Forum des Jungen Films, Mar del Plata, Rotterdam, Max Ophüls Preis, Duisburger Filmwoche, Premiers Plans Festival d’Angers, Mostra Internacional de Cinema Sao Paulo, Mumbai Film Festival, Leeds Film Festival and many others.
Nina Kusturica’s retrospectives and films have been shown in various artistic contexts and distributed internationally.
In addition to her work as a director, she holds seminars, workshops and lectures in Austria and internationally at various universities and institutes for film, directing and acting.
She studied directing and film editing at the Film Academy Vienna, University of Music and Performing Arts.
Félix Blume (France, 1984) is a sound artist and sound engineer. He currently works and lives between Mexico, Brazil and France.
He uses sound as a basic material in sound pieces, videos, actions and installations. His work is focused on listening, it invites us to a different perception of our surroundings. His process is often collaborative, working with communities, using public space as the context within which he explores and presents his works. He is interested in myths and their contemporary interpretation, in human dialogues both with inhabited natural and urban contexts, in what voices can tell beyond words.
His sound pieces have been broadcasted in radios from all over the world. He has been awarded with the “soundscape” prize for his video-piece Curupira, creature of the wood and the “Pierre Schaeffer” prize for his work Los Gritos de México at the Phonurgia Nova Awards
Mahan Mirarab is an Iranian/Austrian guitarist, composer, arranger and music producer based in Vienna and Berlin.
He has spent years learning about Persian traditional music as well as the indigenous sound and cultures of the country such as Arabic, African, Turkish, Kurdish, etc., while refining his skills in Jazz, western classic and popular music. Notably using fretless guitar, he specialises in blending the microtonal systems with jazz and improvised music.
He is among some of the most innovative minds in Iran who has redefined music in their culture despite the challenges facing musicians after the Iranian revolution. His work throughout 21 years is creating a new generation of musicians, who are being inspired and influenced by his guitar playing and compositions.
His dedication to expand his musical vocabulary brought him to Europe in 2009 where he met and collaborated with numerous musicians from all over the world such as Anthony Braxton, Erkan Ogur, Alain Perez, Hadar Noiberg, Johannes Berauer, Omar Klein, András Dés, etc. His approach to composition and arrangement introduces a unique blend of rhythms and harmonies that showcases his rich musical vocabulary as well as his depth of knowledge in many different music styles. As a result, his compositions avoid so brilliantly cliche and expands the understanding of how each style can be interpreted. Mirarab is composing, arranging and performing in many jazz, experimental, acoustic/electronic, folk and traditional projects as well as film, dance and theatre.
His aim is to introduce a new narrative through music in regards to middle eastern cultures and jazz and in doing so he has succeeded to create his complex yet approachable style.
He represents a generation of young migrant musicians in Europe who are changing the sound boarders in the music industry and are pushing for more diversity with respect to quality, dialogue and creativity.
Sakina was born into a Kurdish Alevite family in the small town of Varto in Turkey. As a teenager she started singing with Turkish choirs and bands, but it wasn’t until she entered university that she became acquainted with Kurdish musical traditions and set out to defy cultural assimilation. In 1991 she joined the Mespotamian Cultural Centre in Istanbul, a proponent of Kurdish culture, as a vocalist. Like many other Kurdish musicians, she was forced to literally go underground to practise her music and soon she had to choose political activism over art.
It wasn’t until Sakina arrived to Austria as a political refugee in 2006 that she took to singing as a full-time pursuit again. The first fruit of her concentrated creative efforts were released in the form of her first solo album ROYÊ MI, globally distributed by ARC Music.
Sakina joined forces with pianist Nazê Îşxan and violinist Nurê Dilovanî to form the all-female TRIO MARA, drawing on traditional Kurdish songs mainly sung by and handed down from woman to woman, enrichening the material with Western classical and contemporary approaches. In 2013 the trio released their first album DERI / BEHIND THE DOORS, recorded live at the Rudolf Ötker Hall in Bielefeld. The album was distributed by AHENK MÜZIK and earned the trio a wider acknowledgement. They were included in the portfolio of the Secretary of Culture of North-Rhine Westfalia and publicly commissioned to tour a number of venues in the region.
Since 2013 Sakina works with another group, the ANADOLU QUARTETT, touring Austria and Germany. Their first tour is successfully documented in the form of the live album KÖPRÜ/THE BRIDGE (Ahenk Müzik), a recording that reached a large audience and garnered the group critical recognition.
On top of all that, Sakina has established the Vienna-based ensemble “Sakina & Friends” featuring musicians from Iran, Spain, Austria and Turkey. They regularly perform throughout Austria, where Sakina appears on a lot of album projects and concert bills, never tired to support other artists.