Austrian Music Award Nominee Seba Kayan, is a Viennese Artist, DJ, producer, and Lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, working at the forefront of a movement to “decolonize electronic music”.

Seba’s practice has been instrumental to bringing diverse crowds together by merging the sounds and aesthetics of electronic music and Diasporic heritage. 

Drawing from her European and her Kurdish heritage, Seba adopts a methodology of disruption, challenging fixed narratives of the “Orient” and “Occident” as theorized by Edward Said. Her practice blends archival research, oral traditions, techno, and experimental sound to interrogate Orientalism, collective memory, and the politics of listening.

Her work transforms cultural perspectives through performances, installations, and collective sonic rituals that foreground marginalized histories and amplify suppressed voices.

Non-orthodox use of music genres and sound archives in the club scene dominated by the hegemonic, seemingly apolitical entertainment, allows her to reveal the actual emancipatory potential of a club culture and its ability to subvert, rather than to maintain the dominant narratives. Assemblages of samples, stories and aesthetics come together in artistic and political quest to create cross-cultural encounters in society divided along cultural, racial and religious lines.