- 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.