MATA PRESENTS
2023

Guest Curators

2023 MATA Presents Artists

Golnaz Shariatzadeh

Golnaz is a composer, improviser and visual artist. She creates sonic spaces inspired by visual forms. Her music explores the unfamiliar territories of sound and is heavily influenced by film. Her works have been performed by ensembles such as Elision ensemble, Ensemble Recherche, Nadar Ensemble, TAK ensemble, line upon line, JACK Quartet amongst others. She is currently a PhD candidate in composition at Harvard University studying with Chaya Czernowin and Hans Tutschku.

fabric of sorrow

fabric of sorrow is a large-scale fantasy inspired by the current revolution in Iran. It begins inside an architecture made of skin and flesh. Standing upright from people’s pain and sacrifice, the architecture is a perpetual machine that turns the pain into ethereal spaces.

Shara Lunon

Shara Lunon is the product of the evolution of Black American musical traditions. As a poet, vocalist, composer, and improviser, her art finds the ethereal in the chaotic. With voice as the foundation, Shara’s music is an exploration of text and sound that seamlessly weaves through the ongoing relationship of struggle, resilience, and resolution. Her goal is to challenge lassitude and in its place, instill hope. Shara has performed with leading improvisers including Darius Jones, Ches Smith, Joy Guidry, and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble. Her work has been featured in The Gothamist, Metropolis Ensemble, and has won residency with Amanda + James production company, Audiofemme, and was a featured composer in the 2022 MATA Festival and Metropolis Ensemble BIOPHONY series. Currently, Shara is working with the Innova Recording Label to release a new project in 2023.

Bitter Fruits

Bitter Fruits is an electronic song cycle exploring survival techniques that have developed in response to oppression and injustice within our government, society, and communities. There are intentional injustices, and passive. Both have cultivated methods of coping so that marginalized people can function in their daily lives. Defined by Tina Campt in her “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity” these everyday tools, or the quotidian, is what black and brown people need to survive. I define Bitter Fruits as the gains reaped by marginalized people in the United States. It examines ideas of erasure and displacement and engages with tokenism, code-switching, and other forms of quotidian survival techniques. I explore the feelings that emerge when these tools are put into action using a light-reactive custom synthesizer in the form of a 10-foot braided wig.

Jane Boxall

Jane Boxall is an adventurous composer-percussionist, working across diverse musical genres. As a soloist, collaborator and session player, Jane has performed in concert halls, art galleries, cafes, castles, kindergartens, hospitals, universities, forests and festivals from Cyprus to San Francisco, India to Quebec, and Manhattan to France. She is dedicated to new music, specializing in contemporary art music on marimba and vibes, and rock and hiphop drumkit for original artists. Born in England and raised in Scotland, Jane completed her BA and MA in Contemporary Music at the University of York (UK), and her Doctorate in Percussion Performance & Literature (minor in Composition & Theory) at the University of Illinois.

Replaying the Tape

Replaying the Tape is a collaboration between women practitioners: New-York based composer Dr. Jane Boxall, palaeontologist Dr. Frankie Dunn, and poet Penny Boxall. We will conjure an imaginary menagerie of animals which might have existed had the dice-throw of evolution fallen differently. Jane will compose and premiere new music for tape and live percussionist, which in a performance setting will interweave with the live poetry performance.

About MATA Presents