Artists

Una Lee

"I am an artist working with sounds, stories and sensations, in perpetual pursuit of alternative storytelling. I seek innovation in the contemporary marriage between performance and poetry through an eclectic practice, and explore human condition, memory, time, and our relationship with art and ecology. I often draw narratives from my autobiographical events as well as my present identity as a non-native in my current habitat."

"My piece ’68 years’ emerged promptly after my chat with Ryoko. At first, I wanted to use an archival recording from a Korean radio broadcast from 1950 about the Korean War having broken out. This wasn’t available, and in fact is pretty unlikely to exist as a recording now. Instead, I drew from a special, yet tragic, official ceremony of returning the recovered soldiers’ bodies back to South-Korea from North-Korea via the US 68 years after that war. The piece includes the beginning of a speech made by the then president Moon Jae-In, and my aptly disjointed translations."

www.unalee.org

Instagram: @singinguna


Bonnie Han Jones

Bonnie Han Jones is a Korean-American improvising musician, poet, and performer working with electronic sound and text. She performs solo and in numerous collaborative music, film, and visual art projects.

"We've: Community" is a research-creation, "soundscape essay", that engages aspects of soundscape composition (field recordings sourced from freesound.org) as a means to explore ideas of "real" and "inauthentic" space and sound. The space created within the essay is a metaphor for the spaces that displaced persons inhabit – both lived and speculative.

bonnie-jones.com
Instagram: @bonniehanjones


Lisa Ullén

songs - objects of reflexion (working title)

"I use melodic and rhythmic fragments, seeking music with several layers where different textures and rhythmic sounds wander through each other. Memory and experience transform into the sounds and songs."

Lisa Ullén is one of Sweden’s most influential pianists in the free jazz and improvisational scene, as well as contemporary music. Internationally recognized as a distinctive and uncompromising musician and composer.

Born in Seoul, Ullén grew up in the northern part of Sweden. She has studied at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and has conducted further studies in the USA, and at the Royal Institute of Art.

In 2018, Ullén was awarded the prestigious Jazz Composer of the Year prize by Swedish Radio, and her recordings have received several awards, including the 2019 Manifest Gala prize for her triple solo album Piano Works.

She has been working and touring for many years with a number of groups and projects, and is currently working with her solo project Heirloom, Space Trio, chamber sextet GAHLMM, Reading Music, and a duo with Nina de Heney.

In 2024, she released the solo piano LP Heirloom (FÖNSTRET).

"This, then, is music about identity, but in its complexity, its coincidences and its contradictions, changes and consistencies, it is surely one of the most honest and realistic musical depictions of human identity ever created." (Garreth Brooke)

lisaullen.com
Instagram: @lisa_ullen


Nguyễn Baly

Nguyễn Baly and Tara Transitory, as Nguyễn + Transitory, transform spaces into musical architectures, merging traditional folk and contemporary forms to explore the transformative nature of sound—its dramaturgies and its spectral ties to cognitive memories, lost histories, and collective experiences in contemporaneity. Rather than dissolving distinctions between folk traditions and contemporary practices, they seek to create new artistic languages that emerge from the friction and dialogue between disparate forms, allowing each tradition to retain its integrity while giving rise to something entirely new—an evolving expression that neither privileges nor diminishes the past or present.

Queer Ear Mastering, their mastering studio, extends this approach by reclaiming the production process.

nguyentransitory.com
Instagram: @nguyen.transitory
Facebook: @nguyen.transitory


Yara Mekawei

A prolific artist and scholar, Mekawei’s sonic bricolages draw inspiration from the dynamic flow of urban centers and the key infrastructure of cities. Interested in the philosophy of architecture, social history, and philosophical literature, Mekawei implemented the optical transaction from the musical conversation and transferred sound waves to visual forms.

Her work is based on sound as an essential tool of vision, and the philosophy of composition is shaped by sophisticated practices that convey conceptual messages to the public. Mekawei's research-based practice humbly draws on history, intimately connecting the ideology of the mythic past to the developed technology of the eternal present.

She is currently working on a sonic composition based on the literature of Sufi philosophy and the methodology of the Book of the Dead.

yaramekawei.com
Spotify: Yara Mekawei on Spotify


Khabat Abas

Khabat Abas is a cellist, composer, and interdisciplinary artist from Kurdistan-Iraq. Her work explores time, space, and memory through music, everyday sounds, and noises. She delves deeply into how we experience sound, particularly in various geopolitical contexts. Abas uses her instrument beyond traditional norms—improvising, composing, creating videos and sound installations, crafting cellos from diverse materials, and incorporating her body into performances. Through this approach, her work merges politics with personal expression, challenging conventional values and control.

"For My Mother Najat"

"This multi-track cello composition, with field recordings, reflects on a conversation I had with Ryoko Akama. It took me back to a very sensitive moment. Therefore, this track is dedicated to my mother."

khabatabas.com