Another Sun

Another Sun is a long-form live program forming out of the exhibition “Iter Subterraneum” and its descent to the centre of the Earth. Evolving over the year as a constellation of readings, sonic interventions, artist residencies, workshops, talks, film screenings, and commissioned performances, the program investigates the subsurface as a framework for contemporary expression.

The Hollow Earth hypothesis at the core of the exhibition’s inspirational novel, Niels Klim’s Underground Travels, once stimulated the 18th-century European imaginary, literary works, and scientific expeditions in search of polar openings, subterranean oceans, and inner habitable spheres. As science and technology yielded a more precise mapping of the Earth’s density, however, tales of journeys to interior worlds lost credibility. In their place, a new literary imaginary of the subsurface emerged, less concerned with discovering a space below than with manufacturing one.

At the same time, the disenchantment and demystification of Earth’s layers produce an image of the underground aligned with its reimagination as inert, immutable, valuable, and non-relational matter. This conceptualisation, legitimising extraction, positions the subsurface as a source of energy and profit, a terrain to be re-organised through the instruments of human, social and ecological devastation unequally distributed along racial lines. These are racialised geophysics, as articulated by Kathryn Yussof, in which the mine becomes the paradigm, psychically splitting the world across the surface and the subsurface, across the inhuman, the human, and the non-human.

Another Sun invites artists who articulate layered understandings of the subsurface as ways of thinking through the underlayers of social, institutional, and planetary life. In this way, the program attempts to deploy an alternative grammar of the subterrain as we know it, finding language in increasing pressure, gravity, and proximity.

On September 20, interdisciplinary artist Nazanin Noori presents the premiere of A LETTER TO EUROPE, a new spoken word opera commissioned by Bergen Kunsthall. The work is based on a poem by the poet and playwright Athena Farrokhzad addressing migration, borders, and displacement in contemporary Europe. Combining voice, percussion, and quadraphonic electronics, A LETTER TO EUROPE features a score composed by Noori and musician and composer Andrea Belfi.

Drawing on the structure of a wedding, the performance brings together a classical Iranian singer, Samin Ghorbani, two spoken-word performers, Kate Strong and Noori herself, and two drummers, Andrea Belfi and Ludwig Wandinger. Alternating between spoken text and songs, the work reflects the poem’s movement between affective and political registers, while the drum and electronic score establish a counter-structure of rhythm and control, echoing the rigid frameworks of institutional systems.

Taking the myth of Europa from Greek mythology as a point of departure, the work translates themes of coercion and contested belonging into a staged configuration. The mythological reference operates as a structural parallel rather than narrative illustration, situating Farrokhzad’s critique of Europe within a longer history of forced movement and asymmetrical power relations.

Nazanin Noori ( نازنین نوری‎) is an artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her interdisciplinary work includes sound art, composition, live and lecture performance, installation, direction, and text. With a formal education in theatre, film and media studies, Noori addresses the merging of sound, space, sculpture and post-dramatic poetry, focusing on atmospheric narratives. Her hypnoacoustic compositions extend into simultaneous layered Doom Electronics, culminating in a form she has coined AMBIENT HARDCORE.

In 2016, she began her work with compositions for theatre and art film. Her debut album FARCE, published on the enmossed label in 2020, was followed by her 54-minute sound piece HAAL, which premiered in 2021 at the Berliner Festspiele exhibition “The Sun Machine Is Coming Down” at the ICC and was subsequently released by Deutschlandfunk Kultur.

Nazanin Noori’s artworks were on view at EIGEN + ART Lab, Auto Italia, Akademie der Künste, CCA Berlin, M Leuven, House of World Cultures, Eye Filmmuseum, and Transmediale. Her performances have been staged at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Villa Massimo, Berghain, Schirn Kunsthalle, Schauspielhaus Zürich, La Gaîté Lyrique, CTM Festival and ICA London. She had artist residencies at Junge Akademie der Künste, Rupert and Callie’s. Her theatre works were staged at Maxim Gorki Theater, Deutsches Theater and Berliner Ensemble. Her sound scenarios have been presented in international radio stations, such as Mutant Radio, Deep House Tehran and Refuge Worldwide, where she has held a residency since 2021.​ ​Nazanin Noori was awarded the ars viva prize for Visual Arts (2026).