Seba Kayan – Scales of Knowledge

Free entry

For Seba Kayan, the dance floor is a site of memory work, cultural exploration, and sonic possibilities. An artist, DJ, producer, and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Kayan explores club culture as a space for diasporic sound and decolonial practice. Drawing from her own Kurdish heritage and transcending Western musical tradition, her work asks how sound carries memory, power, and cultural hierarchy.

Her performance for the Biennale Matter of Art is part of her ongoing research into how electronic music is conditioned by Eurocentric ideas of scale and sound. Every musical system comes from a specific culture and history. What gets taught as neutral or universal in European music theory is just one system among many, while other musical cultures work with entirely different scales, rhythms, and understandings of time. Seba Kayan uses the dance floor to make this visible and to open up space for other ways of hearing and knowing.