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Goethe-Institut im Exil

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8:00 PM

Unmuted: Love and Iran

Listening Session & Concert |A Valentine’s Day Special

  • ACUD Club, Berlin

  • English
  • Free entrance

Farafaz © Unknown

Farafaz © Unknown

Since the 1979 revolution, it has beennearly impossiblefor women in Iran to sing in public. Female voices are widely considered provocative and politically sensitive—a ban that continues to be enforced through strict permit systems, surveillance, and security forces. At the same time, music has historically and continues to be a central medium through which one theme repeatedly finds expression: love.

In Persian music, love plays a multifaceted role. It appears as a poetic motif, a spiritual quest, and a politically charged experience. In classical Persian poetry — from Hafez to Rumi — love isimagined as a transformative force that dissolves the boundaries between the individual, the community, and the world.

This politically imposed dissonance forms the starting point of the evening. On Valentine’s Day, the Goethe-Institut in Exile invites audiences to a listening session and two concerts that explore love at the intersection of contemporary Iranian music, diasporic experience, and political structures.

The artist, singer, and activist Faravaz Farvardin connects her music to the Women, Life, Freedom movement, addressing the intimate ties between love, courage, and political resistance. Moving between trap beats and Persian references, she tells stories of defiance, new beginnings, and empowerment. Her debut album Azadi (2025) brings this artistic trajectory together as a powerful statement against repression and division.

Berlin-based artist MADANII, shaped by the experience of growing up in Germany as the daughter of political refugees, explores queer love, belonging, and life between cultures in her songs. Musically, her work draws on avant-pop, alternative R&B, and trap; visually, she consistently develops each project as a self-contained audiovisual narrative. Her music makes palpable how love, as an expression of individual freedom, takes shape even within restrictive contexts.

Together, Faravaz and MADANII present songs that they associate with love in all its facets: as longing and loss, as courage and political action, and as a bond to language, origin, and community.

In light of the current situation in Iran, this event is held with thoughts of those affected. We warmly invite especially those with ties to Iran to join us for this evening of shared presence.

 

Artists

Together with music journalist Aida Baghernejad and the audience, a space of attentive listening emerges — a moment in which music is not only heard, but collectively questioned.

  • Aida Baghernejad is a freelance journalist and host based in Berlin. She writes and speaks about music, literature, film, and food for outlets including Die Zeit, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Musikexpress, Der Tagesspiegel, and The Guardian. Occasionally she bringsall ofthese together at once; more often, she focuses on the political dimensions of sound, the page, or the plate. In 2024, she spent five months as a Thomas Mann Fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. Online, she can be found through her culture and discourse newsletter Recommended Reading. She mostly lives in Berlin, sometimes in London, andabove all onthe internet.

  • Faravaz Farvardin was born in 1990 in Tehran. She started learning music in age of 12 by playing the Guitar andlater onshe also learnt playing some other instruments such as, Piano, Harmonica, Ney-Anban as well as singing. Her music masters had been, Hasmikkarpetyan, Sara Naeini, Esfandiyar Gharebaghi. 

    She is an independent singer who has released 10 pieces of and 2 music videos in pop, rock, folk and fusion genres which has been widely welcomed. She is currently working on her two new singing albums in collaboration with non-Iranian companies as well as on her teaching classes. 

    She is one the youngest woman leaders in her generation who has started to create and perform fusion pieces through western music styles and Iranian folkloric music. She has performed in many music and theater performances as well.She believes she needs tosing to survive.

  • MADANII is a genre-rebel from Berlin, blending rhythms, languages, politics, and sounds into a unique tapestry. Rooted in Persian culture and her upbringing as a refugee's daughter, she tells stories of identity, queerness, and cultural duality in an avant-pop, R&B, and trap style.

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