Artist Talk: "Catching Ghosts" w/ Nancy Mounir

Moderation: Felix Klopotek

IN BETWEEN SPACES is a series of events and platform for music, sounds and sound art from Africa, the Arab world and Europe, their social contexts, transcultural issues and artistic collaborations.

With the project "Nozhet El Nofous (Those Who Were Not Invited)", Egyptian musician and composer Nancy Mounir will bring a special piece of alternative historiography of Arab music to the stage in Europe for the first time in November 2022. Her compositions for chamber ensemble and shellac archive material restage the work of three important Egyptian female music pioneers of the 1920s and 1930s: Fatma Serry, Hatma Sabry and Mounira El Mahdeya, who - despite their emancipatory, cultural and musical pioneering achievements - were not invited to the groundbreaking and still controversial Arabic Music Conference in Cairo in 1932. In conversation with Felix Klopotek, Nancy Mounir provides insight into historical contexts and backgrounds, her five years of research work - as well as into the musical and personal freedom of these three musicians in pre-war Cairo, which is still provocative today.

For the German premiere of the concert program on November 16 at the Stadtgarten in Cologne, Nancy Mounir will be working with her Egyptian ensemble and the Avîan Quartet, which specializes in Kurdish and Middle Eastern music and is led by Cologne violinist Nure Dlovani.