Sound forms an integral element of ‘Red Wind, Coral Worlds’, an exhibition curated by Huda Tayob and Miriam Hillawi Abraham, recipients of the Art Jameel Curatorial Open Call 2025–2026. As part of the exhibition’s closing programme, Hayy Sounds presents a series of listening stations along with a photographic display, in collaboration with Frequency Room, that explores the vast and often underrepresented sonic histories, practices and encounters extending across the expansive geographies and entanglements of the Red Sea.

Like the red wind, sound offers an alternative mapping of geographic and urban space: a temporal residue that can be felt, heard and carried across distance, borders and generations. It moves through ports, coastlines, cities and rural landscapes, carried by migration, memory and exchange. Existing alongside oral history, sound also retains a certain opacity — something that cannot always be fully translated, traced or contained. As Sudanese singer-songwriter and composer Mustafa Sid Ahmed famously sang, “I swear we are with the birds that do not know maps and don’t carry passports”, evoking sound as something that exceeds borders and formal structures of belonging, while opening onto the exchanges through which people, histories and musical traditions encounter one another.

The programme brings together released and unreleased sonic materials, vocal and rhythmic testimonies from the region that have existed outside established frameworks or been overlooked within them. Rather than treating these sounds as inherently peripheral, Hayy Sounds asks how social, political and cultural structures have placed particular communities, practices and forms of expression at the margins in the first place — and what becomes possible when these histories are listened to on their own terms. 

To listen to these sounds is not simply to recover what has been overlooked, but to recognise their agency as practices for the future entering new contexts, technologies and forms of production. The closing programme shows the power and spoken truths of contemporary artists, researchers and collaborators, whose works have been influenced and inspired by the Red Sea, as a living site, whilst reimagining possibilities for new sonic identities and cultural connections.

The listening stations feature: Rotations of Bismillah by music journalist, DJ and researcher Atiyyah Khan, Index of Edges – Watery Stories featuring over 20 artists, Ibtihalat by sound artist Mhmmad Safa and a compilation of albums including Sweet As Broken Dates (Somalia), The Shaigiya Sound of Sudan, Two Niles to Sing A Melody (Sudan) and 808 Xamar (Somalia/Saudi Arabia), produced by Ostinato Records (co-founded by Vik Sohonie & Janto Koité).

For more details about the Rotations of Bismillah listening session with Atiyyah Khan and Huda Tayob on Saturday, September 26, click HERE

Instagram handles: @atiyyahkhan، @ostinatorecords، @mhamad__safa، @hudatayob، @miru_h، @frequencyroom.co