Natascha Sadr Haghighian

tunes of summoning

25 January 2023

I’ve been listening to music a lot these days. Tunes that keep me company in dark times, that summon what is lost and to be found, bereavement and courage. The tunes in my head are really leakages. They ooze, they trickle, they call in, permeated with collective desires, demands, fears and stakes. They are not just mine, but really belong in between bodies. They tie together again what is repeatedly torn apart and silenced, and in that they call for collectivity. In this talk I want to share some tunes accompanied by some of the projects I’ve been involved in over the past few years.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian (born Budapest, 1987 or Sachsenheim, 1968 or 1976 or Australia, 1979 or Munich, 1979 or Tehran, 1967 or Iran, 1966 or 1953) is an artist who lives and works in Berlin, Germany or Kassel, Germany or Gütersloh, Germany or Santa Monica, California, USA or the Cotswolds, Great Britain. Sadr Haghighian develops installations, video and audio works, as well as performative interventions to imagine infrastructures and conditions of collectivity. Her practice is deeply invested in collaboration, sensual play and listening as modes of unraveling liberal individuality and the boundaries of cognition. Recently she has been interested in epistemic disobedience as a mode of unlearning coloniality. She co-founded various collectives and coalitions, among them the institute for incongruous translation together with Ashkan Sepahvand, and kaf together with Shahab Fotouhi and Tirdad Zolghadr. She was part of the Society of Friends of Halit and the Tribunal “Unraveling the NSU Complex”.