Harnessing music’s power to heal and transform

Conceived by Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, the Lullaby Project pairs pregnant women and new mothers and fathers with professional artists to write and sing personal lullabies for their babies, supporting maternal health, aiding child development, and strengthening the bond between parent and child. Extending across the country and through several international programs, the Lullaby Project enables partner organizations to support families in their own communities. Join a conversation with Noe Music, a San Francisco based national partner with the Lullaby Project and one of San Francisco’s most well respected non-profit organizations Homeless Prenatal Program (HPP) to learn more about how they are collaborating to improve well-being and child bonds with new parents experiencing housing insecurity and other challenging life situations.

Join a conversation with:

Meena Bhasin, Co-artistic and Executive Director, Noe Music

Emily Eagen, Carnegie Hall, Lead Teaching Artist, Carnegie Hall, The Lullaby Project

Guadalupe Valenzuela, Director of Wellness Program, Homeless Prenatal Program (HPP)

Join the online conversation with Rashin Fahandej, creator of "A Father’s Lullaby," and Bay Area sound artist, Sholeh Asgary, on July 22, 4:00 pm (PDT) organized by Diaspora Art Connection and Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies, San Francisco State University. This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

Registration link: http://tinyurl.com/CenterJuly292021

"A Father's Lullaby" is part of a physical and virtual exhibition "Sounds Like Home" which opens on July 16th at the SOMArts Gallery (934 Brannan Street, San Francisco). It is an ongoing series of interactive public installations, community-engaged workshops, and a participatory website by Boston-based artist Rashin Fahandej. Intimate interviews, songs, and lullabies offer poetic meditations on the spaces of love and trauma, presence and absence, and the power of personal memories to interrogate the structural violence of mass incarceration.

A Father's Lullaby also highlights the role of men in raising children and their absence due to the racial disparities in the criminal justice system and its direct impact on children, women, and lower-income communities. The project is centered on marginalized voices of absent fathers while inviting all men to participate by singing lullabies and sharing memories of childhood; this exhibit uses art and technology to mobilize a plethora of voices while utilizing public places and virtual spaces to ignite a more inclusive dialogue to effect social change.

Explored through the space of love and intimacy, the project is being developed with community members as creative collaborators.

About the Artists:

Rashin Fahandej is an Iranian-American multimedia artist and filmmaker. Her projects center on marginalized voices, and the role of media, technology, and public collaboration in generating social change. A proponent of “Art as Ecosystem,” Rashin defines her projects as “Poetic Cyber Movement for Social Justice,” where art mobilizes a plethora of voices by creating connections between public places and virtual spaces.

Rashin is the founder of A Father’s Lullaby, a multi-platform, co-creative project that highlights the role of men in raising children and their absence due to racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Marginalia, a series of poetic documentaries about Baha’i immigrants of Iranian descent, narrates a historical persecution in their homeland.

Rashin has served as an artistic director of the Rebuilding the Gwozdziec Synagogue at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2017 Boston Artist-In-Residence with Mayor’s office of art and culture and 2018 Public Art Resident at Boston Center for the Arts. She is a research fellow at MIT Open Documentary Lab and the 2019 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellow, Artist in Residence at ThoughtWork Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston James and a recipient of the Audrey Foster Prize.

Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist whose practice is shaped by her early somatic experiences as a refugee. Situating the body as a site of knowledge, her immersive works, performances, and audience participatory scores implicate the viewer-participant into future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history, through water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, voice, and sound. She has exhibited and performed at various institutions including ARoS Kunstmuseum (DK), Sotheby’s Institute of Art (NY), Minnesota Street Project (SF), Charlotte Street Foundation (MO), and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (SF). A 2020 California Arts Council grantee for her participatory performance series “Majles,” she is also a recipient of a 2019 Kenneth Rainin Foundation NEW Commissioning grant through Dance Elixir, and recipient of a 2014 Alternative Exposure Grant for curatorial initiatives as Curator and Director of Education and Public Programs at Incline Gallery, where she founded The Project Room. Asgary has participated in numerous residencies, current and most recently including Mass MoCA (2021), Headlands Center for the Arts (2021), Real Time & Space (2021), Wassaic Project (2020), ARoS Kunstmuseum (2021), and Kala Art Institute (2020). Currently residing in Oakland, CA, where she is a Lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice, teaching Global Perspectives in Contemporary Art, she received her MFA from Mills College and BA from San Francisco State University and has lectured extensively on photography.

‘Sounds Like Home’ launches with a virtual opening reception bringing artists, curators and musicians together to deep into the world of lullabies. Starting with curators’ introduction of the exhibition in conversation with exhibiting artists, the event will be followed by a musical talk with amazing musicians and masters.

Program:

18:00 - Curator and Artist Talk

Ceyda Oskay, Hannah Reyes Morales, Rashin Fahandej

Co-presented with Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley

19:00 - Lullaby Sessions

Mahsa Vahdat & Marjan Vahdat & Khatchadour Katchadourian

Co-presented with Diaspora Arts Connection

About Musicians:

Mahsa Vahdat is an award-winning performer of Persian vocal art and a strong advocate of freedom of expression in music. Her career has given a deeper knowledge of Iranian poetry and music to large audiences in the world and has taken Persian poetry and music to new heights. Mahsa believes in creating a universal expression of music based on her traditional and regional musical roots. Without being visible in her own society because of restrictions of female solo voice after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 in Iran, she and her sister Marjan Vahdat have continuous contact with a large audience who appreciate their art, both in Iran and abroad.

Mahsa has three decades of pedagogical experience in teaching classical Persian music to Iranian, and non-Iranian students alike, and has mentored her students on a variety of wide-ranging collaborative projects. On June 19, 2020 Mahsa celebrated the release of her new Enlighten the Night CD (available on the KKV label).

For more information, you can visit mahsavahdat.net

Marjan Vahdat Iranian singer Marjan Vahdat's career has given a deeper knowledge about Iranian poetry and music to large audiences in Europe, America, Asia, Oceania and Africa. Marjan has developed her personal style based on the Persian vocal tradition of classical and regional folk music, with a contemporary expression. she always searched for ways to make her music relevant to the present world. Even if the origin of her styles is Iranian, she believes in her music’s ability to express a universal message of humanism and freedom.

Since 1995 she has performed as an independent singer and musician in many concerts and festivals in Asia, Europe, America and Africa. Following her participation in the album Lullabies from the Axis of Evil (2004), Marjan together with her sister Mahsa started a long lasting collaboration with the Norwegian record label Kirkelig Kulturverksted (KKV) and This collaboration led to a worldwide release of a series of records and a number of tours and concerts in many countries.

Khatchadour Khatchadourian was born in Lebanon, and grew up singing for 7 years in the Syrian-Armenian children's choir, Karoun. He credits the start of his musical focus on meditative genres to his early years singing in Armenian Orthodox church. He began playing the Armenian woodwind, Duduk, in 2006. He holds Bachelor's degrees in both Anthropology & Middle Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Khatchadour is a founding member of the Sayat Nvaq Ensemble (Traditional Eastern Armenian, 2015), Saideh & Khatch (Persian & Armenian, 2014), and Yeraz Ensemble (Arabic & Armenian, 2018). He is also a supporting musician in the Kaavya Connections: World Poetry, Literature & Music. Khatchadour combines sacred Armenian and Arabic voice with Duduk and electronica. He works within world music, meditation, sound healing and ambient music genres. Khatchadour's latest album focuses on Armenian lullabies.

For more information, you can visit khatchmusic.com

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