13/06/2026
I have known Ava Setayesh since she was seven years old, from that early period in which words were never merely signs for her, but something almost physical, like breath spreading gently through space. Even then, she read the poetry of Sohrab Sepehri and Fereydoon Moshiri with a calm that did not feel acquired but innate, as though understanding were less an act of interpretation than a natural attunement to rhythm, image, and what resonates between the lines. It was clear from the outset that poetry, for her, is not a matter of memory or recitation, but a way of being, a quiet participation in language itself.
Today she studies Medical Informatics at Shiraz University, yet this scientific path has never detached her from the world of sound. On the contrary, her musical expression seems to open up a parallel and highly distinctive form of thought. Her singing does not present itself as performance so much as condensation, as though a moment were gathering itself just before speech or silence. Her voice does not impose itself, nor does it assert anything. And it is precisely in this refusal of assertion that her presence emerges, one that does not exhaust itself in the instant but continues to resonate.
In her artistic practice she turns to texts that appear simple on the surface yet carry considerable emotional density beneath.
Among them, she interprets a song by Mohsen Chavoshi with remarkable restraint, rendering any gesture of excess unnecessary:
“My Mood Is Bad Again
Yet I am still waiting for the day
when a window opens
and all these clouds pass across the sky of my heart.”
In her rendition, these lines do not become a form of pathos but a quiet tension between pain and patience. Hope here is not presented as declaration but as a state of waiting itself, something unfinished that finds its truth precisely in that incompletion.
In the interplay of music, voice, and artistic sensibility, one can discern the outline of a generation living between limitation and possibility, between inner unrest and a longing for openness. Yet what elsewhere might become discourse or gesture remains in her work an inward movement. Nothing is explained, nothing is displayed. Everything remains suspended within what is heard.
Perhaps it is precisely here that the distinctive quality of her art resides: in its refusal to assert, and its ability instead to make audible something that resists language, and therefore lingers all the more profoundly.
Song: My Mood Is Bad Again
Lyrics: Hossein Safa
Music: Mohsen Chavooshi
Performance: Ava Setayesh
Guitar: Amir Hossein Emami
Cajón: Nima Doozandegi
Sound Engineering: Amirali Parsaei
Text: Mansoureh Rahnama
