On May 16, Altes Pfandhaus becomes a space where sound and movement meet memory, identity, and resistance, with Fatat Band and Mona Farivar.
The evening opens with tikké tikké, a powerful solo by Hamburg-based artist Mona Farivar. Moving between Hip-Hop and traditional Persian dance, she unravels layers of transgenerational experience — tracing the weight of family history, displacement, and self-definition. What emerges is not just performance, but a self-claimed space: raw, intimate, and unapologetically personal.
The night continues with Fatat Band, led by Syrian-born trumpeter Milad Khawam. Rooted in Arabic and classical traditions, his compositions drift into jazz and experimental territories — always circling questions of identity and belonging. Alongside him, Salam Alhassan’s percussive language carries rhythms from Aleppo into a global dialogue, joined by guest musicians Modar Salama and Mikail Yakut, whose textures on percussion and accordion expand the sonic field even further.
Expect a Levantine pulse shaped for the present: trumpet cutting through layered rhythms, bittersweet melodies that pull you inward while keeping your body moving. This is not just a concert — it’s an encounter with sound as memory, migration, and emotional release.
Fatat Band
Rooted in Berlin, Fatat Band builds a sound that feels both grounded and in motion — a Levantine pulse shaped through migration, collaboration, and experimentation. Led by trumpeter Milad Khawam, the music moves between Arabic traditions, jazz, and contemporary influences, without settling into one fixed language.
Trumpet lines cut through dense rhythmic layers, carried by Salam Alhassan’s percussive foundation and expanded through guest contributions from Modar Salama and Mikail Yakut. Accordion textures weave in and out, adding both weight and lightness. The result is a sound that holds contradiction: melancholic yet driving, intimate yet expansive. It pulls you inward while keeping the body in motion — music that asks you to feel and respond at the same time.
Monā Farivar — tikké tikké
In tikké tikké, Monā Farivar approaches dance as excavation. Layer by layer, she unpacks identity shaped by a transgenerational Iranian experience in Germany — navigating inheritance, distance, and the quiet tensions of belonging.
Her movement language blends hip-hop with elements of traditional Persian dance, but not as fusion for aesthetics — rather as a necessary vocabulary to articulate what sits between cultures. The piece moves through fragmentation and reconstruction, where absence becomes material and vulnerability becomes structure.
What unfolds is not just choreography, but a process of claiming space: confronting personal and collective memory while building something self-defined. It’s raw, intentional, and leaves little room for passive watching.
Artists
Monā Farivar (Hamburg)
Based in Hamburg, Monā Farivar is a multidisciplinary artist working across dance, film, performance, and sound design. Rooted in the German hip-hop scene, her practice moves between stage and screen, often centering questions of identity, memory, and autonomy. In tikké tikké, she blends freestyle hip-hop with elements of traditional Persian dance, creating a physical language that holds both rupture and resilience — a process of confronting inherited narratives while carving out her own space.
Milad Khawam (Berlin) — Trumpet, Composition
A Syrian-born composer, producer, and trumpet player based in Berlin, Milad Khawam works at the intersection of Arabic music, classical training, and crossover jazz. His compositions are deeply narrative, shaped by migration, identity, and personal history. Releases like To the West and Funeral on the Moon trace emotional and sonic journeys that are both intimate and expansive, positioning the trumpet as a voice that carries memory across borders.
Salam Alhassan (Berlin) — Percussion
Originally from Aleppo and now based in Berlin, Salam Alhassan is a percussionist and multidisciplinary artist whose work spans music, animation, and comics. With years of experience in collaborative projects across scenes, his rhythmic approach is both grounded and exploratory — weaving together Arabic percussion traditions with global influences, creating dynamic, layered soundscapes in live performance.
Modar Salama (Netherlands) — Percussion
Based in Netherlands, Modar Salama is a percussionist known for bridging Middle Eastern rhythms with contemporary Western sounds. His practice moves fluidly between live performance and studio work, building percussive textures that are precise, adaptable, and border-crossing — expanding rhythm into a shared language.
Mikail Yakut (Berlin) — Accordion
A Berlin-based accordionist trained under Eduard Wall and jazz pianist Jana Liebschwager, Mikail Yakut brings a wide-ranging musical vocabulary into his work. Moving between contemporary, improvised, and theater music, he pushes the accordion beyond its conventional role — integrating piano and electronic elements to create layered, genre-defying compositions that add depth and unexpected texture to the ensemble.
