Yalda:

is an ancient tradition marking the winter solstice. It is observed by communities spanning Central Asia to Southwest Asia and the Caucasus. “Yalda” means birth and commemorates the birth of the sun goddess, Mithra, ending the longest night of the year and embracing the ultimate triumph of light over darkness. It is a community gathering around seasonal nourishment and spending the long night honoring this cosmic transition by garnering wisdom offered in the poetry of Hafez.

sees Yalda as a metaphor for ending the dark reign of empire and racial capitalism and inviting the birth of light, resistance and revolutionary change. We will be in community while honoring the grief over two years of genocide and destruction in Gaza, Sudan, the ongoing violence of ICE raids around the country and rise of fascist governments attacking the safety and livelihood of queer and trans people.

The event is an immersive and introspective experience as well as a community gathering around art and nourishment to honor collective grief while shaping new ways to set cultural traditions. In the same way that we evoke Hafez to receive wisdom from his ghazals, we read the histories, prose and poems of abolitionist, anti-imperialist feminist thinkers, to reflect on our past, engage with our present and take action for our future. We will honor the roots of this ancient tradition while grounded in the context of present day struggles for liberation and the history of revolutionary ancestors.

Sholeh Asgary

Sholeh is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages sound, hybrid art forms, and performance to investigate, memorialize, and express the complexities of joy and survival inherent in diasporic and refugee experiences.

Asgary’s primary material and deepest conceptual concern is sound. Through site-specific installations, sound sculptures, performances, archival projects, and collective collaborations, her work challenges colonial assumptions about what is heard, proposing new futures.

Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi

is an Iranian composer and performer. She writes for hybrid instrumental/electronic ensembles, creates electroacoustic and audiovisual works, builds instruments, and performs electronic music. Her work experiments with merging Iranian music with the more contemporary classical music aesthetics. Being a cross-disciplinary artist, she has actively collaborated on projects evolving around dance, film, and theater. Her work experiments with merging Iranian music with the more contemporary classical music aesthetics. She is the co-founder and producer of Fashion x Electronics, a collective focused on creating interdisciplinary works based on fashion and electronic music.

OMJVinyls

Omjvinyls, is an Afghan American archivist and DJ from the San Francisco Bay Area with roots in Kunar and Nuristan. Since age 14, he’s been digging through thrift stores and record shops, building a global collection of vinyl and cassettes that bridges Afghan sounds with international music culture. He's worked with members of the Afghan diaspora and collaborators in Afghanistan to recover rare TV footage, radio recordings, and cassette tapes. He also co-created Side A of the Dast Dar Dast cassette with Falgoush. Beyond archiving, he digitizes, translates and shares Afghan poems, songs, and TV clips—keeping the country’s cultural memory alive and accessible.

ALCHEMIA

ALCHEMIA is an Iranian DJ and multidisciplinary artist. From a young age she started collecting records through flea markets in Iran and since then has expanded from primarily spinning vinyl to digital mixes that include wider sonic influences from Levantine Synthpop to Acid House, Iranian folk music, Cumbia, Darkwave to field recordings and poetry with an emphasis on highlighting global music from SWANA and beyond. Rooted in a radical imagination, both politically and creatively, the north star of art for liberation is what drives her creative practice, be it in music, multimedia printmaking, audio storytelling or photography. Her monthly show, Taste of Cherry, airs live on Oakland’s Lower Grand Radio every 1st Wednesday of the month.