Workshops and Conference
Birdsong and Echoes 2026
Oh My Malaya: If Postcards Could Sing 2026
Dammam: Weekends at Fuddruckers 2021
Lost Culture 2021
Covid-19 2020
Living Memories: Objects, Materials, and the Making of Home 2026
- Kawan! Kawan! Exhibition 2026
- MRes Research Journeys Exhibition 2026
- Storytelling Through Art and Design 2025
- FACE x RCA Summit Conversations 2024
- ‘Roots and Routes’ 2024
- Photography, Image, and Ethics 2023
- Common Ground Exhibit 2021
Researcher, Artist, Educator
Taking inspiration from postcolonial theorists, philosophers, academic scholars, photographers and artists, Zarifah investigates the construction of sociopolitical identity.
She facilitates an artistic intervention on the postcolonial understanding of the social and political systems that continue to serve hierarchies of power.
Informed by her third culture-identity and second-generation migrant background, Zarifah utilises her Malaysian and Saudi Arabian identity as a bridge in understanding the ethical considerations when discussing global affairs, with a focus on the Global Majority discourse.
Zarifah’s methodology engages with history, archival material, visual cultures, and decoloniality. Through this critical discourse, she responds to the themes of resurfacing untold and marginalised narratives, complexities of our contemporary moments, and the pluralities of a postcolonial liberation.
At the root of criticality, Zarifah has worked within the sectors of video art, photography, zine, book arts, and design.
She has participated in the Experimental Biography Symposium at Royal College of Art (RCA) 2026, Fashion Academics Creating Equity (FACE) x Royal College of Art (RCA) Summit 2024, placement with the Guardian Archive, teaching sessions on photography and ethics, and co-delivery of workshops at London College of Fashion and London College of Communication.
Zarifah holds a Masters Degree in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography and a Bachelor's Degree in Media Communications, both obtained at the University of the Arts London (UAL). In 2026, she will obtain a Masters of Research (Mres) at Royal College of Art.
Overview of Research Projects
Fragments in Return
Textile Installation, 2026A series of fabric-based works that reconfigure archival and photographic imagery through textile printing. Using translucency, layering, and spatial suspension, the works translate colonial and historical visual material into fragile, shifting surfaces. They explore how images circulate, dissolve, and reappear, foregrounding absence, Fragmentation, and the contested afterlives of archives.
Back to Front:
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Malay House: Cotton-Linen, 228gsm, 142cm x 90cm
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Padi: Organza, 40gsm, 105.11cm x 70cm
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Hibiscus: Organza, 40gsm, 80cm x 53.09cm
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Postcard Letter: Lace, 35gsm, 70cm x 46.69cm
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Joget: Polyester, 55cm x 40cm (top left)
First 2 Photographs by Pupat Chenaksara
Birdsong and Echoes
Sonic Collage, 2026An experimental sonic collage composed for cassette tape, weaving together found sounds, archival audio, and environmental recordings sourced from Freesound and Internet Archive. The work disrupts folkloric and national soundscapes from Malaysia through layered interruption, exploring how sonic memory, identity, and colonial histories are constructed, Fragmented, and reassembled through listening.
Oh My Malaya: If Postcards Could Sing
Moving Image and Sound Piece, 2026Oh My Malaya: If Postcards Could Sing is an experimental moving image work combining archival postcards (late 1800s–1950s) and found sound. Drawing from colonial-era visual culture in British Malaya, it reflects on how postal imagery circulated representations of land, labour, and identity across shifting administrative and imperial structures.
Screen Excerpts from Oh My Malaya: If Postcards Could Sing
Dammam: Weekends at Fuddruckers
Publication, 2021
Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia’s newest campaign devoted to diversifying the country’s dependency on oil, has been a blueprint for new reforms for women. Drawing on these changes, Zarifah explores the relationship between law and order and the construction of cultural values. Zarifah approaches Dammam: Weekends at Fuddruckers as a dialogue in understanding women’s positionality under patriarchal structures.
Spoken from the female gaze, the publication details the recollection of memory, childhood, and family in light of Saudi Arabia’s changing socio-political atmosphere. It takes the form of a visual letter and memoir, serving a critical reflection of the construction of women’s cultural identities. Zarifah’s work draws on the themes of gender segregation, patriarchy, and policy. It unpacks Zarifah’s fond memories of her childhood in Saudi Arabia, while reflecting on the accepted ideas, beliefs, and traditions that are passed on from generation to generation.
The work includes symbolic written text reminiscing memories of certain restaurants and routines that have been embarked on with Zarifah and her family. Some of the visuals found in the work includes original scans of objects that have been shipped to Zarifah by her family over the years. Together, the written and visual components of the work significantly build the visual setting of her life in Saudi Arabia. While there is comfort and nostalgia that sets the mood of the publication, there is also an embedded realisation of unpacking behind her childhood’s changing socio-political atmosphere.
Zarifah’s publication is accompanied by an in-depth Critical Report that dives deeper into the concepts of family structure in Saudi Arabian law, patriarchal responsibility, complexity of cultural identity, and unpacking the challenging lens on the structure women are raised in.
The concept of policy and the construction of cultural identity is explored through the research of the country’s lack of stability for immigrants and the role it plays in following law and order. Zarifah looks into the government’s infrastructure within Islamic contexts, using histories and theories, paralleling how it interplays with the new reforms and changes in the country. Zarifah’s research explores the history of patriarchy and changing times for Saudi Arabia, in contribution to the wider dialogue of how society integrates long standing tradition and values with change.
To understand the scope of the country’s socio-political atmosphere, she looks at family structure and its role in shaping culture and identity, particularly at patriarchy, male figure, and family law. Incorporating research on Islamic feminism and its relation to change in values, this helps framework the symbolism of the new reforms taking place in Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. This research project contributes to the understanding of governmental values and how it is implemented and integrated into culture and society.
Her research and work focuses on the cultural aspect of ideologies for the future to provide a nuanced approach in accepting new ideas and change into society.
Zarifah’s Critical Report can be sent to read via e-mail and access to the full publication is subject to availability upon request.
Scan Excerpts from Dammam: Weekends at Fuddruckers
Lost Culture
Moving Image and Sound Piece, 2021
Lost Culture (2021) is an in-depth body of documentary work in the form of video art. It explores the concept of a lost culture through nostalgia, identity, and migration. While Lost Culture (2021) focuses on Malaysia as an example of postcolonial societies, the work can resonate with an extended audience as it plays on many universal themes of humanity.
The work challenges cultural stereotypes and representations by revisiting colonial history, challenging the accountability and impact it has played on postcolonial societies. It frameworks memories of the past, heritage, history, and culture. This invites the broader audience to resonate and reflect on these visual elements. Zarifah’s approach creates an immersive space of unity, empathy, and understanding of cultural identities and migration.
Structured around Malaysia’s colonial history while condensing into the formation of cultural identity, the work is made up of archival material, speculative sound, music, and original narration. The narration takes place in the style of a manifesto, reflecting on facts, policies, promises, and motives. Combined with an eerie, speculative, and nationalistic soundtrack, Zarifah’s Lost Culture (2021) creates a visual lens into the nationalism and identity that makes up postcolonial Malaysia.
Lost Culture (2021) incorporates the poetic, reflective, yet critical framework found in video art that emerges viewers in Malaysia’s postcolonialism and culture through memory and nostalgia.
Behind the Research
This body of work is an extensive piece built upon many layers of visual communication. Zarifah’s research aims to reconstruct a new lens in viewing colonial history and its continued impact on today’s society. Lost Culture (2021) aims to decolonise Malaysia by revisiting its history and identity. It invites the viewer to emerge into time, critically reflect on the consequences of colonialism, and review our role in understanding it.
Video art has been a significant medium in contemporary art since the 1960s and became popular amongst exhibitors in the 1990s. It is known for its experimental space and ability to question, ponder, and critically think. The medium plays on human desire and sense of illusion in a viewer’s participatory setting. It allows viewers to resonate with the video’s universal themes of a lost culture and interchanging identity.
The use of archives in Lost Culture (2021) creates a space of memory and nostalgia, while reflecting on the institutional power of the archival footage. Most of the footage found had been from sources of British origin, notably the British Pathe. Some clips were originally intended for the British state’s archives, while others were a collection of personal documentation from the British gaze.
Acknowledging the origin of these clips enables this body of work to reconstruct and decolonise the lens in viewing them again in today’s day. It begins to reconstruct the origins of the archives, and suggests a newfound approach in decolonising marginalised cultures.
Zarifah’s work enables a visual mediation in beginning to understand the complexity of migration and culture. The nature of video work encourages viewers to contemplate the loss of a culture and identity, reframing the lens in which we view and understand postcolonial societies.
Screen Excerpts from Lost Culture
Covid-19
Moving Image and Essay, 2020COVID-19 (2020) is a film that chronicles the unfolding events of COVID-19 through the lens of the media. The film is constructed of a timeline dating from January 2020 to March 2020, providing a breakdown of the chronicling events. Zarifah examined and uncovered the harmful behaviors that emerged amidst the pandemic. This included accounts of discrimination, racist rhetoric, cultural superiority, scapegoating, attribution of blame, fearmongering, and antagonism as a result of misinformation and false ideologies.
Showcasing a collection of broadcast media and extracts of Donald Trump’s COVID-19 briefings, the use of cross-referencing helped articulate the discourse of news through Trump’s power as a politician, and how his ideologies were transmitted into broadcast media. The work goes on to cover the unfolding events of COVID-19 through lockdown around the world, strategically structuring the juxtaposition of broadcast media’s misleading information.
Zarifah’s film highlights the political responsibility behind these behaviors through the evidence of the US President and US Senator directly addressing China and Chinese culture to COVID-19, despite the history of identification of race in disease outbreaks. COVID-19 (2020) comprehensively examines the discourse of news and conceptualises the link to the harmful behavior resulting in it.
Behind the Research
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). In addition to the fear and anxieties derived from the deadly disease itself, there have been a surplus of fear and anxiety regarding harmful behaviours socially in response to the outbreak.
The New Yorker (2020) details several accounts of these harmful behaviours. Some examples included a man spraying an Asian passenger with Febreze in New York City, a Vietnamese curator, An Nguyen, denied assistance with a gallery due to Asians being seen as carriers of the virus, and a Singaporean man who was attacked on a busy and popular London street. These harmful behaviours have emerged in response to COVID-19, but it is not a new occurrence.
In conjunction with the COVID-19 (2020) film, Zarifah has written a research paper that captures the relevant research that frames the harmful behaviors emerging.
The blame on China for COVID-19 is an example of many previous diseases that have been identified to specific races and nationalities. Zarifah incorporates the politics of risk and blame and the scapegoting theory, where the scapegoated group is found to serve a projection of blame, through the confinement of cultural taboos that further perpetuate their societal oppressions (Schild et al., 2020).
Zarifah’s research presents an array of key theories and concepts that helps frame the discourse of news and the transition from mass media to social media. The transition to social media then reflects on the public’s ideologies and attitudes derived from mainstream media. These ideologies were found to manifest on politicised witnessing, ‘othering’, racist rhetorics, Western hierarchy, scapegoating, attribution of blame, and antagonising China as a result of the misinformation and lack of control of COVID-19.
Zarifah’s research project pushes for the public to look beyond the realms and discourse of the media, and prioritise in education and fact checking, in avoidance of harmful behaviours towards already marginalised communities.
Her research paper can be viewed upon request.
- Living Memories: Objects, Materials, and the Making of Home 2026
- Kawan! Kawan! Exhibition 2026
- Storytelling Through Art and Design 2025
- FACE x RCA Summit Conversations 2024
- ‘Roots and Routes’ 2024
- Photography, Image, and Ethics 2023
- Common Ground Showcase 2021
Living Memories: Objects, Materials, and the Making of Home
Shoes Off // Hypha Studios 2026
Through dialogue, this talk examines home not as a singular place of belonging, but as an evolving archive of memories, cultural histories, and personal rituals. Drawing from experiences of diaspora, migration, and displacement, the conversation explores how objects and materials hold narratives- carrying traces of family, geography, identity, and inherited histories.
How do we carry memories of home?
How do objects become vessels for stories?
How do we activate spaces through material, gesture, and collective memory?
As practitioners working through cultural identity, we return to questions of retrieval and reconstruction: what histories are preserved, what has been fragmented, and what is renegotiated through our practices? Through textiles, domestic objects, sound, imagery, and everyday rituals, we consider how meaning is continuously transformed as materials move between places and generations.
This event is a public programme part of Kawan! Kawan!, Shoes Off’s second annual summer exhibition, on view from 7 August - 5 September 2026 on Thursday to Sunday 12-6pm at Hypha Gallery Euston.
Artist Speakers: Audrey Lukban, Arty Nicharee and Monochaotic
Hosted and Moderated by Zarifah Ahmad Zamri
Kawan! Kawan!
Shoes Off // Hypha Studios 2026
Through a multidisciplinary dialogue of sculpture, moving image, painting, jewellery and photography, we explore cultural identity, history and memory within the experience of the Southeast Asian diaspora.
Our exhibition delves into diasporic culture and its ever-changing concept of “home”. In Malay, “kawan” means “friend”, an ethos of fellowship and care. Surfacing the usually buried connections that underlie collective work, Kawan! Kawan! foregrounds companionship as a thread that underpins collaboration. With trust, presence and intimate dialogues at its foundation, this exhibition emerges as an extension of our collective creative practices to empower migrant communities through art. Creating with others who understand what it means to show up slowly and intentionally, Kawan! Kawan! is a metaphor for the inner growth that occurs when journeying with a community.
Through diverse public programming, we invite creatives and local audiences to an experimental platform where Southeast Asian identities and hospitality can be practiced and explored; where global communities can gather and connect.
About Shoes Off
Shoes Off (established 2025) is a network and collective founded in London, UK. Based across the UK and Southeast Asia, Shoes Off takes a grassroots approach, fostering an environment of shared curiosity and collaboration through experimental exhibitions, public programmes, workshops and digital spaces. We aim to redefine diversity and seek to create conversations regarding barriers that create hierarchies and misrepresentations in the contemporary art world.
Photography by Carlo Zambon
MRes Research Journeys Exhibition
Royal College of Art 2026
The MRes RCA is interdisciplinary: students from the fields of architecture, communication, design, fine art and the experimental humanities come together in a single programme to think about their practice as transforming, and as being transformed by, work in other disciplines. Students come to us to pursue a project of their choosing through thesis and practice in dialogue with one another. Assured in their practices as artists, for example (or as writers, curators, architects, product designers, visual communicators – and the list goes on), students come to develop their knowledge on a topic that feels vital to them, which they filter through their practice.
Interdisciplinary Research Methods
'Inter’ is a Latin prefix, a word-forming element which means ‘between’, ‘among’, or ‘in the middle of’. It also describes states of mutuality, reciprocity, and exchange; of being together, ultimately for one another – think, for example of the word interdependence. In our work on the MRes RCA, we emphasise what can be gained from locating one’s work between the things such as disciplines and departments that universities often separate. The interdisciplinary space is one of freedom, risk, and experimentation: disciplines are traversed; possibilities are explored; hierarchies are critiqued; knowledge is not amassed but shared. Across many different teaching methods, we introduce students to examples of often unfamiliar, suppressed, neglected work which points us to new ways of seeing, thinking, and doing.
Experimental Biography Symposium
Royal College of Art 2026
With talks by Sara Hudson on her work on the nature writer and artist Hope Bourne (1918–2010), and by Dame Hermione Lee on life-writing practices and her new biography of art historian and novelist Anita Brookner (1928–2016), the symposium brings together established scholars and emerging researchers on the MRes programme. It opens biography up as a shared, experimental practice and a dynamic, interdisciplinary terrain.
Zarifah presented ‘A Biography of Linda and Zamri’, with a focus on witnessing and retelling of lives with care.
Storytelling Through Art and Design
London College of Communication 2025
Storytelling Through Art and Design: Visualising Racial and Social Justice is a workshop initiative at LCC, developed in collaboration with the Information Centre and Changemakers. It explores how creative practice can advocate for racial and social justice through visual storytelling.
The initiative also aims to connect current and former Changemakers, fostering long-term collaboration and community. It aligns with UAL’s commitment to decolonising education and empowering students as creative change-makers.
Zarifah and Zeinep Kudaikulova designed, delivered, and hosted the workshop which included an open call for students.
Fashion and the Arts Creating Equity (FACE) x RCA Summit
Royal College of Art
2024
- Join us at RCA Battersea for a summit filled with insightful, discussions, creative exchanges and networking opportunities. Our lineup of speakers included industry leaders, innovators, and RCA Alumni. Get ready for an energetic yet intimate, soulful and joyous, hard hitting look at the future of art, design, technology and creativity.
Zarifah participates in the second day lineup of speakers that focuses on a morning of Recentering Souls and an afternoon of Recentering Spaces, and ends with an evening celebration.
In this combined presentation and panel discussion, Gabrielle Miller, Kemi Ajose, and Zarifah will share the development of the project, and how we have worked to embed this workshop into the curriculum at LCF in order to address equity in education that relates to belonging, community and attainment.
Roots and Routes
London College of Fashion, London College of Communication 2024
Working alongside Roots and Routes, we delivered sessions on the BA (Hons) Menswear and BA (Hons) Fashion Imaging and Illustration course at London College of Fashion (LCF), and college-wide sessions at London College of Communication (LCC).
“If you think of culture always as a return to roots — R-O-O-T-S — you’re missing the point. I think of culture as routes — R-O-U-T-E-S — the various routes by which people travel, culture travels, culture moves, culture, develops, culture changes, cultures migrate, etc.”
– Stuart Hall
Sessions ran in the form of critical theory, conversations, and Zine making. It explores Climate, Racial, and Social Justice and reflecting our values and positions in our work, daily lives, and connections to nature and history. In the second part of the session, students created artworks in response to discussion and provocation.
Positionality and Photography
London College of Communication 2023
The Positionality Writing Workshop looks at what it means to include ‘you’ in your writing, art, and design. Delving into the session through the lens of language, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, religion, and residence, these themes inform the basis of our positionality. As a result, we looked into the bias of reading lists and how students can create their own citational justice, discovering their own reading list. This will lead to new possibilities in image making.
The weaponisation of photography is a framework to discuss ideas around the context of photographs. The Image Making & Ethics Seminar dives into the ethics of photography, deconstructing the principles that guide how we take and share photographs. Photography ethics are subjective, contextual, and fluid, meaning that every person’s ethics will be different, since ethics are based on a person’s life experience and values.
Project Evaluator (Make Space Residency)
Kingswood House 2023
Each team will work with an emerging music artist from the UK to create campaign material in the form. This brief was inspired by the children of the Windrush generation, who used clothing and a new found style to create their own identities and separate themselves from their parents. Their style was influenced by what musicians who were pioneering ska and reggae music were wearing, as well as mixing styles from the Caribbean, America and Britain to create a very distinct style.
Knowledge Exchange (KE) is about working with non-academic partners in a mutually beneficial way to bring positive social, cultural, environmental, and economic change. As KE Project Evaluator, Zarifah worked to tell the story of the changes that have happened as a result of the project (in the form of short film, video, and/or writing), providing evidence to support the changes. I critically reflect on how things were done (participants, activities, collaboration), recognise and celebrate project stakeholders, measure outcomes and impact, and collect evidence to tell the story of change. The project evaluation will help make the project more sustainable and scale up going forward.
Common Ground Postgraduate Showcase
London College of Communication 2021
Showcasing her project “Dammam: Weekends at Fuddruckers”, Zarifah’s exhibit included 7 original prints, a video screening, and a display copy of the project’s publication. Her work fell under the curated theme of ‘The Female Gaze’. The LCC Postgraduate Showcase is renowned for its invitation and partnership with leading Photography networks, such as the British Journal of Photography and Peckham24.
Zarifah also participated in the Female Gaze Panel Talk. What can photography do to empower women and reveal gendered aspects of our societies? Join writer and course leader Max Houghton in conversation with MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography students Abigail Fahey, Susheel Schroeder, Xiuli Gao, Sara Romanin Jacur, Lina Geoushy, and Zarifah Ahmad Zamri in an hour-long discussion on the female gaze.