Living Memories: Objects, Materials, and the Making of Home
Shoes Off // Hypha Studios 2026

A panel discussion and conversation exploring how home is remembered, reconstructed, and carried through objects, materials, and embodied practices.

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

For our second annual summer show, Shoes Off is pleased to present Kawan! Kawan! a group exhibition featuring artists Zarifah Ahmad Zamri, Yadanar Aung, Ainara Basco, Sona Kharel, Audrey Lukban, Monochaotic, Arty Nicharee, Huda Osni, Aarti Pillai, Fajrina Razak, Liszu Tan and Julian Udine at Hypha Studios, Euston, London UK.

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

Showcasing Fragments in Return, Birdsong and Echoes, and Oh My Malaya: If Postcards Could Sing as part of the RCA’s MRes Research Journeys 2026 Show held at Hangar Space, Battersea.

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

What does biography allow us to understand about lives, practices, and research in the arts and experimental humanities today, including the lives of objects, environments, and built forms?

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

Roots and Routes

London College of Fashion, London College of Communication 2024

Roots and Routes is a project that aims to raise awareness of biases and injustices within the fashion industry, and contribute to inclusive, responsible and accountable practices.

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

Zarifah co-delivered workshops with the BA (Hons) Commercial Photography course London College of Communication (LCC). The sessions included Positionality Writing Workshop and Image Making & Ethics Debate Seminar.

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

Kingswood House Residency, created by D. Wiafe and Adrian Wood's Contentlab, is designed to change how BAME students at the London College Of Communication experience decoloniality in creative practice/enterprise, mentorship and place based learning. The residency invites 12 BA (Hons) Photography students from underrepresented backgrounds to collaborate with 12 external creatives from BaDConcept to create new work about imagined identities, histories and cultural heritage at Kingwood House. Kingswood House, formerly known as Bovril Castle is a Victorian mansion, and Grade II Listed Building in South Dulwich.

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

The LCC Postgraduate Showcase celebrates some of the most exciting work from the next generation of leading creatives who are pushing the boundaries of design, media, and screen. On November 24 2021, Zarifah exhibited in the LCC Postgraduate Showcase “Common Ground” held at London College of Communication, Elephant and Castle, London UK for its 3-day exhibition.

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.

Zarifah Ahmad Zamri

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