The Savor of a Sweet Surprise

In the kitchen of siblings Sepideh and Afrang’s grandmother, strangers are always arriving. For each of them, their grandmother prepares halva, decorating it with pistachios, flowers and pearls in the shapes of lions, fish and birds. Then, the strangers vanish as mysteriously as they came.

The Savor of a Sweet Surprise is an interactive performance where we collectively decorate a halva, while the siblings share anecdotes about their encounters with these surprise guests. Together, we start to piece together the contours of the vanished strangers until we can smell the sweet kitchen aroma of their past for ourselves.

Sepideh Khodarahmi is a choreographer, dancer and actor educated at the University of Stage and Music in Gothenburg, the Hogeschool for the Arts in Amsterdam and the Broadway Dance Center in New York. Sepideh has been exploring drag as expression since 2016, both as a performer and teacher. They are occupied with topics such as destruction, cakesitting, hypergender, eroticism, intimacy, queerness, and power. In their work, sensuality is a recurring element and method. Sepideh has worked with Marina Abramovic, Hooman Sharifi and Dinis Machado to name a few and performed on internationally prestigious stages such as The Royal Theatre in Stockholm and Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisboa.

Afrang Nordlöf Malekian is an Iranian-Swedish artist, whose work engages with the dreams and aspirations of silenced, muted, or unnoticed creators, actors, and makers of history. Their practice seeks to explore how the language of unrealized utopias reappears, returns, and transforms into a flexible, scattered force that advances collective efforts. Through performances and installations grounded in archival research, Nordlöf Malekian’s work creates spaces where these quiet dreams can be heard, expanded upon, and ideally, realized. By blurring the borders between fiction and history, their work aims to generate alternative futures, composing documents and performances they wishes had existed in specific historical contexts. Afrang Nordlöf Malekian has exhibited at the 10th Berlin Biennale, the Moderna Museet, West Den Haag and the Tensta konsthall, among others.