Plattform: Nazanin Noori, Jade Meili Barget
14:00
Join us for a conversation and listening session with multidisciplinary artist Nazanin Noori, ahead of the premiere of her spoken opera A LETTER TO EUROPE on September 20. Noori’s spoken word operas allow her many mediums of predilection—installation, film, composition, performance, poetry—to converge in the interpretation of defining literary works. This form has emerged in parallel with increasing threats to freedom of expression and critical discourse in Europe, driven by a renewed urgency to bring forward fearless texts written in defiance of oppressive political regimes. A LETTER TO EUROPE interprets Athena Farrokhzad’s Open Letter to Europe — an incisive address to Europe in the second person, a finger pointed in a one-on-one confrontation on migration, borders, and displacement in contemporary Europe. Last year, Noori presented DEATH FUGUE (TODESFUGE), an interpretation of Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan’s account of the horrors of the National Socialist era in Germany, and in 2024, I PITY THE GARDEN, an interpretation of the work of one of the most significant poets of modern Iranian poetry, Forough Farrokhzad, whose texts protested against corruption and abusive power structures in Iran.
In this conversation and listening session, Nazanin Noori shares insights into the strategies she has found to persist in crafting an artistic language—sonic, atmospheric, visual—able to speak to power, and reflects on the inspiration and models that sustain her own language as a tool of resistance in a time of increasing coercion. The artist will read excerpts of texts, and we will listen to sounds that drive and inspire her compositions.
Biography
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. Since 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, as well as 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 Theatre, Deutsches Theatre, 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).
About Plattform
Plattform is Bergen Kunsthall’s series of lectures and debates. This summer, we present lectures and conversations in connection with the exhibitions of Anawana Haloba and Hanni Kamaly, as well as the curatorial programme Another Sun. This Plattform event will not be streamed live but will be recorded and posted on our website, Facebook and Vimeo.
This event is funded by the Fritt Ord Foundation.
