Azar Saiyar feat. Negin Bahadori and Kaino Wennerstrand
at Oksasenkatu 11 gallery, Helsinki, Finland
11.-27.11.2022

“Let all the mouths, dreams, and views flourish.”
From a message of a speaker that remains unknown.

The basis for The Listeners exhibition are the sounds recorded on audio tapes from the Iranian radio during the 1979 revolution. It was actually the year 1357 in Iran. The tapes were recorded by my Iranian father in Vantaa, Finland. They are at the same time private recordings and documentation of a historical event, evidence of absence and the passing of time. In what different ways can you listen to and read words, sounds, sentences, what kind of meanings can be given to them? How do the words and meanings, the histories carried by the words, translate from a language to another, and keep up with time? 

We translated the content of the tapes from Farsi to Finnish with Negin Bahadori. The exhibition was an installation of three different listenings of these sounds. These listenings consisted of two multichannel film and sound pieces, a text, an audio loop, audio tapes and other objects. In addition, there were three poems by Negin Bahadori and an audio loop by Kaino Wennerstrand. The multichannel film and sound works in the exhibition were made and planned together with cinematographer Joonas Kiviharju and sound designer Kaino Wennerstrand.