composer & sound artist
Interactive Piano performance with one transducer on the piano. Several sound objects containing different types and sizes of bells, one Tibetan bowl, one small toy piano, etc… where provided for the audience to participate in the performance.
She walked the city, with the sound of mothers, singing her lullabies.
Following her fascination with juxtaposition of presenter and receptor, Anahita fashioned her own earrings made of small broadband glass speakers. While hiding the technical parts of the constellation in a backpack, she walks around the city center in Darmstadt. Out of her earrings, comes out the voice of Iranian mothers, inside and outside of Iran, singing lullabies in their dialects as if trying to sooth her. This performance happened after the brutal murder of an Iranian wrestler “Navid Afkari” by the Islamic regime. In Iranian culture it is traditional for mothers to sing lullabies in the funeral of a child.
In February 2019, Anahita was one of the five winners of the annual Rotary Club-Mainz prize. The performance was happening on May 13, exactly one year after her arrival in Germany for the first time. Therefore, she decided to use the recordings she made in her hometown only two weeks before her departure. She turned the piano into an unusual speaker using an audio exciter (Transducer) and arranged themes based on the Persian modes to be improvised on the same piano and the Persian string instrument “Setar” being played by her friend who also comes from the same town in Iran as her.
A solo and group performance with her colleagues in KlangKunst department. The concept is based on the poem “a dream within a dream” by Edgar Allen Poe. For the solo part she plays a piece composed in 2015 for piano, assistant and audio tape based on three abstract paintings using sounds from her life in Armenia. The piece is quite experimental using objects on the piano, including a vodka shot glass, a brush and 24 color pencils. (12 small and 12 large). As for the group performance, they improvise for almost 20 minutes. In that part she is playing the same self made instrument from “Tangled/Untangled” project using different objects including a violin bow, metal objects, air balloon and etc.
As for the starting of her first semester at KlangKunst department, Anahita and her colleagues were invited by their tutor Kaspar Konig to perform at UMBO culture club in Zurich, Switzerland. For this performance She is using the sound of the water pump machines recorded in her hometown, Ahwaz and make a song out of them to be the background for her solo piano performance. The piano performance is based on a Persian traditional musical mode called “Deylamaan”. During the performance she recites a poem written by her friend currently living in Ahwaz. The poem is regarding the water crisis her people were facing and the gradual turn of events during and after the eight years of forced war with Iraq. Anahita used the sound of the water pump machines as a symbol of the effort people should put on having water during the day.
n Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2018, Anahita used one of the open spaces during the festival to perform a live ambisonic performance with her colleagues Christopher Dahn and Wingel Mendoza. They used recordings they made during the days of the festival in and outside the buildings as the material for live music, one electric guitar, one bass guitar and Anahita being the wandering organic sound source, making noises and telling a story, while distorting her sound using a Kazu. The idea was for the audiences to close their eyes, feel the electronic sounds move among the speakers and the actual walking sound source moving around them.
In Iran, Anahita’s hometown, Ahwaz, is well known due to lots of oil zones in the province. Basically the biggest amount of oil supplement in Iran comps from that province. In any normal world people of that province, let alone people of the whole country, should live a prosperous life. But ironically one of the most popular ways of earning money in her hometown is and has been “Begging”. People are just so used to it that somehow the beggars have become part of the face of the city. Also with the drop of the price on Iranian currency, there are less and less coins being used.
To show the people in her hometown, not only begging does not look alright but also it does not sound so pleasant, I had this idea of picking up the vibrations resulted by coins which pedestrians would throw in her bowl, adding some simple effects to them and present the sound of their action to them as the feedback. Funny enough, many didn’t have coins and since paper bill in a bowl does not make such sound they were forced to search for coins. Many would go few blocks away to different shops and kiosks only to change their bills into coin. She sat on the street wearing full hijab, a bowl with four pickups attached to it and three effect pads under her covers. For the public the sound was so new and unheard of. She received lots of different reactions and feedbacks from public and local press.