Rabt is a nomadic space dedicated to connecting communities through collective engagement, centered around sonic practices.
Rabt’s small yet growing library and archive are hosted by Shaahin Peymani and Maryam Katan (Tehran Limits), where Rabt’s events in Iran also take place.
Initiated in Tehran in 2020 by Golnoosh Heshmati and Sohrab Kashani, Rabt functioned as a transdisciplinary and collaborative studio until 2024 before transitioning to its current nomadic format.
Managing Team
Golnoosh Heshmati
Sohrab Kashani
Editorial
Golbarg Barzin
Hosting/Facilitation
Maryam Katan
Shaahin Peymani
Rabt’s identity designed by Sohrab Kashani.
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Listening Session & Workshop By Aliaskar Abarkas
This session began with a short presentation by artist Aliaskar Abarkas, followed by a listening session featuring selected sounds from over 30 hours of workshops. Developed in collaboration with various composers, poets, and performers, these workshops explored whistling as a sonic material for collective music-making.
As part of the session, Aliaskar invited participants to actively engage with the archive, contributing their instruments—whistles, melodies, voices, and breath—to collectively “musicate” their encounter in relation to one another and the space they gathered in.
Aliaskar Abarkas is an Iranian artist based in London. Committed to alternative and communal art education, he employs a choreographic and sonic approach to facilitate dynamic interactions between individuals, guiding a transition from isolated experiences to collective expressions. Engaging closely with institutional infrastructures, Aliaskar proposes and tests methodologies that reimagine open contexts within which his practice evolves and circulates, leading to contingent shifts in the dimensions of ideas and material forms. In All The Whistlers, he collaborates with diverse creative networks and participants in a collective process that culminates in musical compositions, visual scores, and performances.
Aliaskar holds a fellowship at Sadler’s Wells / Rose Choreographic School (London, 2024–26). Recent interventions have been supported and presented at The Barbican Centre, ICA, The Mosaic Rooms, TACO!, Pushkin House, Cubitt (London), CAPC (Bordeaux), and LOCALES (Rome). Aliaskar’s upcoming projects will be realised at Scuola Piccola Zattere (Venice, Italy) and the Singapore Art Museum.
May 25 2025
Co-facilitation Tehran Limits & Siegrun Salmanian
Lavasanat
Listening Academy x Rabt space
In this collective listening session, we joined online with the Listening Academy in Berlin, an independent research institution focusing on listening as a philosophical, artistic, social, and somatic issue.
Over the past year, in collaboration with the Khamoosh community, several spaces have come together at Rabt—both offline and online—serving as a bridge to imagine new ways of convening and engaging around sound.
Following this edition of the Listening Academy’s focus on "Listening as an Emergent Strategy," inspired by adrienne maree brown, participants were invited to share a sound that made them aware of their body’s relationship to their surrounding space or locale. This could be a sound that evokes feelings of sharing, coexisting, or perhaps a sense of disconnection from the environment.
Golnoosh created an audio mix from the sounds contributed by the participants and facilitated the listening session in Berlin. Meanwhile, in Tehran, Rabt space hosted students from the School of Sonic Arts, a newly established educational program co-founded by Shaahin Peyami. The session at Rabt space was facilitated by Maryam Katan and Shaahin Peyami.
Listen here to the audio mix on The Listening Academy Website.
September 05 2024
Rabt space (Tehran) Listening Academy (Berlin)
Gathering with Khamoosh & Sedākhāne
In August, Khamoosh members will be gathering together at the Rabt space for a full day of different group activities. The day will kick off with a few hours spent with the current residents of the Rabt space, Sedākhāne where its members are currently in the process of digitizing their extensive archive of Iranian folk music. They will introduce Khamoosh to the process of their work while we all listen to some of the music.
We will then have a collective listening session and join online with Khamoosh members who reside outside of Tehran.
Sedākhāne is a space for documenting, analyzing, and reconstructing the history of folk music produced in different cities across Iran.
August 04 2024
Rabt space
online
Presentation by Shaahin Peymani
Join us this Friday at 16:30 for an evening with sound artist, Shaahin Peymani.
For his final graduation show from Sound and Sonic Arts at UdK, Shaahin has created a sound installation that recreates the soundscape of the textile industry in Iran, serving as an investigation into the status quo.
Shaahin will share with us his journey of investigation, focusing on his creative process and sharing the final outcome of his work.
Shaahin Peymani (1990) is a sound artist and composer based in Tehran and Berlin. He often uses found sounds, field recordings, and archival sounds in his works. By recomposing concrete sounds and processed speech voices into collages, he explores the realm of human perception and the deconstruction of language in audio culture, and seeks to redefine modes of listening by transforming sound as an indication of its source into an abstract structural sound object. Shaahin studied Textile engineering and Composition in Tehran, and Sound Studies and Sonic arts in Berlin. In addition to sound installations and Audiovisual performances, his artistic practice includes music composition and sound design for film, animation, theatre and dance.
February 23 2024
Rabt space
24hrs/Palestine
Reverberating across numerous time zones and corners of the world, 24hrs/Palestine is a plurilingual programme that brings together a chorus of voices united in their solidarity with the Palestinian people. Over the course of 24 hours, we will gather in physical spaces and on the airwaves with the aim of hearing from people all over the world about the necessities and possibilities of anti-colonial solidarity from local perspectives.
The broadcast begins on Sunday 18 February in Palestine, at 12:00 midday Palestine time, and will journey listeners all over the globe, from Santiago to Algiers, Nouméa to Helsinki, Casablanca to Kampala, Beirut to Montreal, Bandung to Paris, Cairo to Tehran, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Cape Town to London and Tunis, as well Ukraine, Sudan, Italy and India, culminating at 12:00 midday on Monday 19 February in Palestine. Bringing together a network of independent radio stations, the transmissions will be composed of poetry, music, discussion and readings and will air simultaneously on Radio Alhara, Radio Flouka and others.
Through this virtual and physical gathering, this 24-hour call and response, our aim is to create a space for reflection on our respective practices, languages, impasses, hopes and desires, opening ourselves to other forms of struggle, organisation and expression through our current and historical solidarity with the Palestinian people and land. We wish to consider anti-colonial endurance, its many challenges and its possible shortcomings and hypocrisies, so that together we can better build informed and generous paths for our collective futures.
Palestine is a land that urges and inspires us to act, to dream, to think and to participate in an internationalism that questions our interconnectedness and co-responsibility. The situation in Gaza is a parameter for justice everywhere. 24hrs/Palestine is a modest attempt to cultivate new and lasting collaborations and connections, to encourage an active listening to one another and a provocation to continue communing and reworlding.
⤤ Recording
February 18-19 2024
Rabt space
online
Collective Listening Session by Khamoosh
The second collective listening session organised by the collective Khamoosh will happen on 29 September 2023 at 5 pm CET via Zoom. This session is focused on sounds recorded during the trip of two Khamoosh members to participate in the mangroves’ plantations on Qeshm island. This session is part of a radio residency with Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee Radio.
Following Khamoosh’s first collective listening with Eastfloc community, as part of the audio residency with rec-on, these sessions are proposed as informal gatherings where we follow an experimental approach of bringing sound recordings and listening together. We might then share our reflections, emotions, and thoughts. The idea is to create and share knowledge through listening and to connect commonalities in seemingly disparate contexts.
Alongside the online sessions, Rabt space is hosting these sessions in person in Tehran. This session will be in English and Farsi and last 60-90 mins.
With facilitation and support by Khamoosh members, poemproducer, rec-on.org, Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee Radio, Studio Chahar.
September 29 2023
Rabt space
online
Four-day workshop led by yasamin ghalehnoie
This four-day workshop centered around sci-fi and magical realism storytelling and writing.
In each session, spread over two weeks, yasamin invited participants to reimagine narratives about our future. The sessions began with holding space together and sharing our experiences from the past year living in Iran.
The sessions continued with reading, walking, and experimenting with different ways of collectively navigating and climbing a mountain in Tehran.
The sessions concluded with collective writing and sharing our stories through creating a collective zine and map.
July 2023
Rabt space
Residency at Rabt space: Maryam Katan
In Winter 2022, Maryam Katan used Rabt’s studio in Tehran as her residency space for three months, during which she developed several ongoing projects.
She worked on a short animated documentary by Nazgol Kashani, produced by Fabian&Fred Filmproduktionsgesellschaft, and expanded her research on “Offering to Non-Celebrity Elements” and “Taube Erde Flammenfärbung,” supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. The “Taube Erde” project involved a two-day tour in Erzgebirge, Saxony, exploring the historical impacts of mining and future lithium extraction. During this stage, she engaged with socio-material-ecological issues in underdeveloped mining industries through audio interviews and video archival footage.
Maryam Katan is a Berlin/Tehran-based artist working with animation, film, and audiovisual installations. She holds an MFA in Animation Directing from Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran. Her practice involves displacing and repositioning meanings outside their original discourses, exploring alternative cognitive models, and decolonizing conventional knowledge systems. Maryam was a former editor of the experimental animation department for Iran’s only specialized animation quarterly, Cinema Animation (DEFC), and has been a board member of the “Animation; Experiment” collective since 2018.
Winter 2022
Rabt space
Listening with Tarxun
On September 8th, 2022, sound artist, Farshad Xajehnassiri (aka Tarxun), will give a talk about his artistic practice and presents some of his recent sound and visual works. During this event, Tarxun will hold a conversation with the audience about his encounter with the notions of silence and listening, and their impacts on his approach to sound design.
September 08 2022
Rabt space
The House is Black
Untitled / The House Is Black is an extra-curriculum platform led by Atousa Bandeh. From August 2022 until October 2022, the first part of this program — managed by Reyhan Lal — takes place between 15 participants from Rabt space (Tehran) and 15 students from the Large Glass Department of Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam).
During the workshop, each collaborator will create a video work inspired by the documentary film “The House Is Black” directed by Forough Farrokhzad, which will then be presented and discussed as part of group sessions organized with the participants.
At the end of this program, a one-day screening event will be held simultaneously between Rabt space in Tehran and De Bouwput in Amsterdam.
August-October 2022
Rabt space / De Bouwput
Gerrit Rietveld Academy
Slow-hearing
Gradually towards a continuous path, we are opening Rabt space with a three-day event “Slow-hearing” in collaboration with Tarxun (Farshad Moshiri Xajehnassiri), Maryam Katan and Shaahin Peymani. The site-specific installation by Maryam Katan and Shaahin Peymani is focused on Rabt space’s surroundings and its different layers of history, sound, and mechanics. Tarxun’s installation is an album presentation of tracks made from combining sound art and visualization of Tarxun and the declamation by the poet, Fereydoun Moshiri.
Slow-hearing is an event welcoming the reinterpretation of the past, the reimagination of now, and the representation of new ways of listening and hearing at its most organic pace.
⤤ Brochure
25/28 Feb, 2 Mar 2022
Rabt space