Dania Shihab (AU, 1982)
Residency period: September-November 2026
Dania Shihab is a sound artist, musician, and emergency medicine doctor. Born in Baghdad and raised in Tasmania, she is currently based in Barcelona. Her practice examines identity through the lens of her own conflict-induced forced migration, using sound to question contemporary notions of borders and displacement. She is particularly drawn to memory and meaning, and how they can act as bridges to discarded or marginalized cultures.
Shihab has performed at venues and festivals including Café OTO (London), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), and Sónar (Barcelona). A 2024/25 SHAPE+ platform artist for experimental audiovisual art, she is the founder of the experimental label Paralaxe Editions, with releases on Geographic North, Ecstatic, Superpang, OOH-sounds, and Longform Editions. She is currently an orbiting resident at Hangar (Barcelona) and will join EMS Elektronmusikstudion (Stockholm) as a guest composer in November 2025.
During her residency at La Becque, Dania Shihab will develop The Untended Garden, a project re-sounding the mythological Garden of Eden. Long thought to have been located in what is now southern Iraq, the region, which happens to be her father’s birthplace, has been devastated by ecocide, fueled in part by neocolonial resource extraction. Drawing on archaeoacoustics, ancient tuning systems, real and imagined field recordings, and deconstructed contemporary instrumentation, Shihab will compose a fictocritical soundscape of this lost paradise. The work seeks to reconnect with an unblemished relationship between humanity, nature, and the divine, reimagining the garden as both a site of memory and a space for renewal.