Venue:HGB, Raum 2.08
Partner:Organised as part of (Un)Learning Digitalities - Programme on the Practice and Theory of the Digital with Prof. Jule Flierl (Class for Performative Arts) of the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig.
The project is co-financed by the European Union and is co-financed by tax funds on the basis of the budget approved by the Saxon State Parliament.
Event organised by the Performative Arts Class. The event will be held in English. It is open to all HGB students and employees.
How do artists create public sphere through performance?
In this kick-off event of the summer semester, performance-artists, scholars and activists Edka Jarząb and Azadeh Ganjeh will share insights and practices around their work on intervening in the public sphere through performance in Poland and Iran.
The dynamic between online and offline practices has played a significant role in both contexts. In Iran the digital sphere has been central to organising protests in the past, which is why it has recently become a target of government-imposed internet-blackouts. In Poland, the resistance against the abortion-ban during the pandemic was marked by a creative gathering of voice-presences online, which fed back to the streets during lock-down.
The class for performative arts at HGB, co-led by Jule Flierl and Anna Zett, will host an encounter in which Edka Jarząb and Azadeh Ganjeh meet, witness and interview each other. Edka Jarząb will give a lecture on her sound activism and the biopolitics of voice, followed by a practice session with the group.
Azadeh Ganjeh will share her research on counter-publics in Iran, exploring practices of protest and care. She will invite the public to engage with concepts drawn from her research in a moment of collective physical practice.
The event will with a conversation between the co-leaders of the class Jule Flierl and Anna Zett, and their guests Edka Jarząb and Azadeh Ganjeh.
Schedule
07.04.2026 / 11:00-19:00 / room 2.08 / HGB Leipzig
11:00-13:30 Edka Jarząb theory and practice
15:00-17:30 Azadeh Ganjeh theory and practice
17:45-19:00 talk with Jule Flierl, Anna Zett, Azadeh Ganjeh and Edka Jarząb
Organised as part of (Un)Learning Digitalities - Programme on the Practice and Theory of the Digital with Prof. Jule Flierl (Class for Performative Arts) of the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig.
The project is co-financed by the European Union and is co-financed by tax funds on the basis of the budget adopted by the Saxon State Parliament.
BIOs:
Edka Jarząb is a sound artist practicing deep listening as a starting point for sound activism, exploring the biopolitics of voice and its role as a bridge between private and public. Using radio waves, extended voice techniques, field recording and electronics - she creates audiospheres for her personal and collaborative performance works and installations.
Passionate about the sonic environment, she is organising workshops and sound walks rooted in different schools of acoustic ecologies, and works as a mentor in different projects (Unsound Summer Lab, Field Studies).
Co-founder of Radio Kapitał, a Warsaw based community radio station, where produces poetic radio plays and interventions. She has collaborated with experimental studio WORM in Rotterdam and the interdisciplinary platform Q-O2 based in Brussels.
She leans towards the physical experience of sound and reflections on perception as a relational experience. Her texts can be found in publications on sound ecology or biopolitics of voice and public space, such as "Going Out.Walking. Listening. Soundmaking," edited by Elena Biserna or "Empowering Aesthetics" by Denisa Tomkova (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Azadeh Ganjeh is a Scholar, performance artist, dramaturge, and activist, and a member of the Rebel-IST-hah! collective. Born in Tehran-Iran, she holds a Master's in Theatre Directing from Tehran Art University and a Doctorate in Philosophy-Theatre Studies from Bern University (2017). Azadeh specialises in creating socially engaged and site-specific performances, participatory performances, performative interventions in urban public spaces, and performance for social-political empowerment. Her research interests encompass Narratives and Politics of the stage, the performativity of protests and public interventions, the Performative engagement of body and space, Aesthetics of performativity and politics of space, and activism in performance art and academia.
After serving as a professor at Tehran University and moving to exile, she has lectured extensively across Europe. Since April 2022, she has been a researcher and lecturer at the University of Hildesheim. In October 2024, she was appointed Professor of Performance Art in Social Context at the Hochschule für Künste im Sozialen, Ottersberg. Driven by her commitment to merging artistic practice with critical research on performance and activism, she is an associate member at the Collaborative Research Centre 1512 "Intervening Arts" at Freie Universität Berlin.
