This special book launch event celebrates Durkhanai Ayubi's latest release She Who Tastes, Knows. The book will be available for purchase and signing at the AGSA shop, along with newly launched silk scarves and limited edition prints inspired by the book.

Join us as we explore what lies dormant within a seed - a recipe, a poem, a language, a memory, a place, an idea?

Inspired by the themes explored in She Who Tastes Knows, this intimate conversation brings together acclaimed author Durkhanai Ayubi, Iranian-Australian musician Gelareh Pour and Nature Festival curator Amber Cronin for a richly sensory exploration of the unseen things we inherit and carry forward.

Together, they will trace the journeys of seeds across landscapes and generations, considering how food, language, and storytelling shape our relationship with the living world and shape the way we understand ourselves.

Through conversation they will explore ideas of how acknowledging the nature of our shared movement - whether of seeds, bodies, or knowledge - offers a multiplicity that disrupts the monocultured, sanitised and skewing narratives of power and identity that limit us all. They ask, what is required to allow mindsets to take root that shift us from scarcity to abundance?

Throughout the afternoon, Gelareh Pour will weave music through the conversation, combining her own improvisations with performing new poetic work created especially for this event by Durkhanai known as landays —short, powerful poems traditionally spoken by Afghan women. These moments of music invite audiences to experience ideas that reach beyond language alone.

With spices and ingredients awakening the senses, Germinating the Unseen becomes more than a conversation. It is an invitation to taste, listen to and imagine the invisible threads that connect people, plants and place, revealing how the smallest seeds can cultivate entirely new ways of seeing the world.

Durkhanai Ayubi is an Afghan-born writer whose body of work seeks to reclaim the stories of her motherland, explore the experience of displacement, and interrogate the limitations embedded within normalised notions of justice and power. Her book Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen received global acclaim, winning international awards including from the Food Writers Guild and the Art of Eating.

She has been featured in national and global media, spanning TV, print, podcasts and radio, including in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post and beyond. She has worked extensively in the arts, including contributing to the curation of national literary festivals. She is a Lifelong Fellow of the Atlantic Institute, a social justice–focused organisation based at Oxford University. Here, her work takes on global dimensions, with her research creating frameworks for transformative justice with narrative reclamation at its heart.

Her next book, She Who Tastes, Knows, has been released in 2026. It asks, through a lens of food and peering into the unseen, what more is possible when stories and histories are returned to a people.

She Who Tastes, Knows: A memoir of food, exile and awakening

A beautiful, expansive memoir on food as a vital bridge between cultures, from the internationally award-winning author of Parwana.

To truly understand things, we need to know them. We need to taste them.

This is a story of how food connects us all – not only at the table but to each other's cultures and histories. Durkhanai Ayubi was born in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and she and her family became refugees when she was a small child. She's grown to see her ancestral lands be misunderstood as a desolate war zone of helpless people, with no history or culture worthy of mention, when the reality is in fact steeped in rich, complex histories of incredible cultural significance. Living in Australia, Durkhanai's only tangible connection to the histories of her homeland was through food, first through cooking with her family, and then as an owner of her much-loved award-winning Adelaide family restaurant, Parwana. Years on, and following Afghanistan's systemic collapse in 2021, Durkhanai realised that it was time to revisit those histories and tell the previously untold stories that can help shape a more optimistic future.

She Who Tastes, Knows is an expansive history of Durkhanai's homeland and a vivid, moving story about what it truly means to understand another's culture. Through stories of food, family, belonging and migration, the book traverses cultural boundaries, weaving a tapestry of dignity, empathy and understanding. Each chapter draws on a particular ingredient important to Durkhanai's cultural identity, and explores their life cycles to uncover unseen histories of Afghan culture, the complexities of migrant and refugee experience, and how we as a society might work towards unifying our disparate cultures and ways of seeing the world. In our modern world, which can feel so disjointed, this book shows us – with timeless prescience – how new possibilities for connection are just under the surface, waiting to bloom.

Gelareh Pour is an Iranian-Australian musician, composer and interdisciplinary artist whose work moves between Persian musical traditions, experimentalism, improvisation and contemporary sound. A 2024 Sidney Myer Creative Fellow, she is known for her distinctive use of voice, kamancheh and qeychak alto, developing a deeply personal musical language that she describes as neo-Persian experimentalism.

Drawing on Persian poetry, memory, migration and lived experience, Pour creates work that dissolves boundaries between composition and improvisation, tradition and experimentation, intimacy and intensity. Her performances are shaped by deep listening and an instinctive relationship between sound, space and the people within it.

“The exquisite genius of Gelareh Pour, we simply are not worthy.”
Nick Cave

Born and musically trained in Iran, Pour studied at the Art University of Tehran before relocating to Australia in 2012. She later completed a Master’s in Ethnomusicology at the University of Melbourne, where her research, The Lives of Iranian Women Singers in Diaspora, explored the artistic and professional experiences of Iranian women singers before and after migration. This continuing engagement with language, identity, displacement and the voices of Iranian women remains an important thread through her artistic practice.

Pour is the co-founder of ZÖJ, her long-running collaboration with drummer and percussionist Brian O’Dwyer. Bringing together Persian music, contemporary improvisation, experimental sound, poetry and rhythm, ZÖJ has developed an internationally recognised musical language built around spontaneity, vulnerability and close musical communication.

In 2024, Pour and O’Dwyer received the APRA AMCOS and Australian Music Centre Art Music Award for Excellence in Experimental Practice for ZÖJ. In 2025, ZÖJ received the Zulya Kamalova Award for Best Song in a Non-English Language at the Australian Folk Music Awards. Their work has also been recognised through multiple Art Music Award and Music Victoria Award nominations.

In 2025, Pour was selected for Soundweavings at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada, joining an international community of artists exploring new approaches to intercultural composition, improvisation and collaboration. ZÖJ subsequently recorded their third album, May The Devil’s Ear Be Deaf, at Banff Centre. Recorded live in a single take with no overdubs, the album was released in May 2026 following FIL O FENJOON (2023) and Give Water to Birds (2025).

Pour's work has been presented across Australia, Europe, Canada, Iran and Central Asia, including performances at WOMADelaide, Dark Mofo, MONA FOMA, the National Folk Festival, Melbourne Recital Centre, Phoenix Central Park and Banff Centre. In 2026, ZÖJ was selected as an Official Showcase artist at WOMEX, with further international appearances including Tromsø World and Le Guess Who?.

Beyond ZÖJ, Pour's practice extends across multidisciplinary performance, live cinema, electronic sound and collaborative composition. Her projects include GRASS, ZÖJ's live score for the landmark 1925 silent film Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life, and The Red Vacuum, a major multidisciplinary work drawing on family memory, childhood and the enduring impact of war. She has collaborated with artists and organisations across contemporary music, theatre and visual practice, including the Australian Art Orchestra, Punctum, Rubiks Collective and La Mama Theatre, alongside some of Australia's leading improvising and experimental musicians.

Across her solo work, ZÖJ and an expanding body of interdisciplinary projects, Pour has built a practice that is at once deeply connected to Persian musical and poetic traditions and resolutely contemporary, creating music that moves between cultures without being confined by them.

“One kneels before such beauty.”
Inactuelles, musiques singulières (France)

Website: Gelarehpour.com

Contact the host of Germinating the Unseen: Tasting Memory, Cultivating Belonging