Houbara - Resonanzen Iran 2026 | Tag #2

w/ Ensemble Chakâm | Avin Ahmadi | Delaram Kafashzadeh Quintet

The two-day music festival Houbara - Resonances Iran celebrated its premiere in 2023, inspired by the Woman Life Freedom movement. The fourth edition in May 2026 sees itself as a place for exchange, encounters and shared experiences. In light of the current destructive regional war and the brutal repression and internet blockade by the Iranian regime, it is of the utmost urgency to offer a platform to current contemporary voices from the region. The aim is to honor the significant heritage of Iranian and Kurdish culture and art in order to stimulate discussion and raise awareness.

Houbara is dedicated to artists and ensembles who challenge genre boundaries, creating and exploring their own sound worlds. A meeting space for musical explorations, feminist perspectives and cross-border listening experiences - between experiment and tradition, between personal expression and political statement.

This year, curator Sophie Emilie Beha and co-curator Mona Matbou Riahi are focusing on contemporary and boundary-breaking music that touches, connects and opens up new ways of listening. Houbara sees itself as an invitation to listen together, exchange ideas and discover new perspectives.

On the second day of the festival, Sunday, May 31, the Ensemble Chakâm continues the dialog: named after an ancient Persian poetic form, it unfolds a musical language of string instruments 'talking' to each other, finely nuanced sound prose and intense arcs of tension. Avin Ahmadi transforms the Green Room into a floating, intimate world in between with her poetic songs. At the end of the festival, the Delaram Kafashzadeh Quintet presents a concert that is as poetic as it is energetic - firmly rooted in jazz and at the same time deeply connected to the classical Persian heritage.

The concerts are framed by a short film program curated by Visions of Iran.

The Houbara, is an Iranian endemic migratory bird that is threatened with extinction. The title also refers to "The Conference of the Birds" (منطق الطیر) by Fariduddin Attar - a great mystical poem that is one of the most important works of Persian literature. It describes the pilgrimage of thousands of birds of the world in search of an ideal king. In the end, thirty birds remain - and realize that they themselves are the king they are looking for.

Program Day #2
31.05.2026

16:00 | Concert hall
Iranian Short Films: Choreographies of Resistance (admission free)

In Iran, where it has long been forbidden for women to sing or dance in public, music and movement mostly take place in private spaces and underground networks - and only rarely in public, but always as acts of resistance. In this short film program (documentary, animation, experimental and feature films), sound, song and dance emerge not only as aesthetic forms of expression, but also as testimony to the presence of an absence. Through their voices and bodies, women lend form to a choreography of resistance in which gesture, rhythm and voice carry stories that resist silence.

The short film program was curated by Ghasideh Golmakani as part of a cooperation with the Iranian film festival Visions of Iran. The films are in the original language with English subtitles.

18:00 | Concert hall
Ensemble Chakâm

The ensemble Chakâm, named after an ancient Persian poetic form, unfolds a musical language of dialoging string instruments, delicate prose and haunting verse. The three musicians build on the classical foundations of the Persian, Arabic and Baroque repertoire, in which intense rhythmic passages give way to lively melodic outbursts. The trio also sets their own life situations to music: the longing for homelands left behind at an early age, the feeling of being uprooted and the memories of places that only live on in music - but also the tireless vitality of experience, discovery and new beginnings.

19:00 | Green Room
Avin Ahmadi