Khabat Abas is a cellist, improviser, artist, and composer from Kurdistan who likes to transgress. She experiments with the cello structurally and musically, improvising, composing, creating sound installations and diverse cellos including her shell-case cello (made from a shell dropped on Kurdistan), and using her own body. She is inspired in part by the silenced stories of women, which she makes audible through her compositions, using diverse materials to protest against oppression rooted in social and political systems. She questions what is out of bounds, raising the possibilities of sounds that contrast with traditional musical values and cannot be controlled or commodified.
Abas has performed with numerous ensembles, including the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, Sulaymaniyah string orchestra, Gothenburg Academic Symphony Orchestra, the Non-Ensemble for experimental music, London Improvisers Orchestra and ONe_Orchestra New. She has collaborated with curators, artists and musicians in Kurdistan-Iraq, Sweden, Germany, and the UK. Abas’s recent piece for electro-acoustic cello was performed in Slemani-Kurdistan as a part of the Global Listening Biennial 2021. She also performed at the Space21 festival in Kurdistan-Iraq in 2021, the Winter sound festival in Canterbury 2022 and the Borderline Festival Athens 2022, and she participated in the (Abandoned Space) project, a collaboration between the Sonorities festival in Belfast and Space21 festival in Kurdistan. Her compositions have been played as part of Klangwerkstatt Festival for New Music in Berlin, the Space21 festival in Kurdistan, and new jazz festival in London. She is co-founder, with Hardi Kurda, of Duo Moment; they have released two albums: Broken Resonance on the Space21 Label, and Illegal Performance, recorded at Café Oto 2021. She has been awarded grants from Salam culture house in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Swedish art council community, and Stim Forward Fund in Sweden.
