Where Memory Grows
Details
Saturday 9 August
14:00 - 19:30
FormaHQ & Peveril Gardens
140 Great Dover Street
London, SE1 4GW
Programme
14:00 - 16:00
Clay workshop with artist Paola Bascón
Spaces are limited, RSVP necessary
Screenings
16:30 - 17:30
Encounters on the Tigris by Sherko Abbas and And Still, It Remains by Turab Shah & Arwa Aburawa
Live Performance
18:30–19:30
The evening performance of Where Memory Grows brings together two powerful sonic practices by Khabat Abas and Alya Al-Sultani.
RSVP
Sign up to the workshop (spaces limited)
Sign up to the screenings & performance
Where Memory Grows is curated by MFA Curating students Hazel Yiran Liu and Vanture Wenqiu Zhang, in direct response to Jala Wahid's Slow Crush. The programme is a collaboration between Forma and Goldsmiths, University of London, and is supported by Goldsmiths Exhibitions Hub.
Access
FormaHQ is located on the groundfloor of Peveril Garden studios with a wheelchair accessible, all-gender toilet available. Peveril Gardens, our rooftop garden, is accessible via a lift through Peveril House. Please speak to a member of staff upon arrival, and they will provide lift access.
Where Memory Grows
Saturday 9 August 2025
with Khabat Abas, Sherko Abbas, Paola Bascón, Alya Al-Sultani and Turab Shah& Arwa Aburawa, and; curated by Hazel Yiran Liu and Vanture Wenqiu Zhang
Where Memory Grows is a multi-format public programme curated by Hazel Yiran Liu and Vanture Wenqiu Zhang, MFA Curating students at Goldsmiths. Developed in response to Slow Crush, a new sculpture by artist Jala Wahid, the project explores the tension between remembrance and erasure. Centring on themes of burial and excavation, it examines how memory, the body, ecology, and colonial legacies resurface across time and space. Through a series of film screenings, live performances and a participatory workshop, which together engage visual, sonic and tactile modes of experience, the programme invites reflection on how histories are unearthed, silenced and transmitted through both material and embodied forms.
Taking place on Saturday 9 August, the programme unfolds across three parts, beginning with a tactile clay workshop led by artist Paola Bascón, where participants will explore archaeology and mining as extractive disruptions to the subterranean world. Through breath, touch, and sculptural practice, the session invites reflection on heritage, loss, and colonial memory. In the afternoon, a screening of short films by Sherko Abbas and Turab Shah & Arwa Aburawa offers meditations on land, trauma, and the politics of visibility. Abbas traces the Tigris River through oral histories shaped by ecological collapse and cultural continuity, while Shah and Aburawa examine the toxic afterlives of French nuclear colonialism in the Algerian Sahara. The programme concludes with two solo performances by Khabat Abas and Alya Al-Sultani, whose experimental sound works draw from traditions of improvisation, feminist resistance, and diasporic memory. Together, they compose sonic landscapes where displacement, identity, and embodied history reverberate.
Where Memory Grows, with Khabat Abas, Sherko Abbas, Alya Al-Sultani, Paola Bascón, and Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah. FormaHQ and Peveril Gardens, London. 9 August 2025. Curated by Hazel Yiran Liu and Vanture Wenqiu Zhang in response to Slow Crush by Jala Wahid, 2025. Supported by Arts Council England and Goldsmiths, University of London. Courtesy the artists. Photo: Xintong Huang
Jala Wahid, Slow Crush, 2025. Peveril Gardens, FormaHQ, London. Commissioned and produced by Forma. Supported by The Ampersand Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation, and Arts Council England. Courtesy the artist and Forma. Photo: Xintong Huang.
Where Memory Grows, with Khabat Abas, Sherko Abbas, Alya Al-Sultani, Paola Bascón, and Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah. FormaHQ and Peveril Gardens, London. 9 August 2025. Curated by Hazel Yiran Liu and Vanture Wenqiu Zhang in response to Slow Crush by Jala Wahid, 2025. Supported by Arts Council England and Goldsmiths, University of London. Courtesy the artists. Photo: Xintong Huang
Where Memory Grows, with Khabat Abas, Sherko Abbas, Alya Al-Sultani, Paola Bascón, and Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah. FormaHQ and Peveril Gardens, London. 9 August 2025. Curated by Hazel Yiran Liu and Vanture Wenqiu Zhang in response to Slow Crush by Jala Wahid, 2025. Supported by Arts Council England and Goldsmiths, University of London. Courtesy the artists. Photo: Xintong Huang
Where Memory Grows, with Khabat Abas, Sherko Abbas, Alya Al-Sultani, Paola Bascón, and Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah. FormaHQ and Peveril Gardens, London. 9 August 2025. Curated by Hazel Yiran Liu and Vanture Wenqiu Zhang in response to Slow Crush by Jala Wahid, 2025. Supported by Arts Council England and Goldsmiths, University of London. Courtesy the artists. Photo: Xintong Huang
Programme
Workshop
14:00–16:00
Artist Paola Bascón will lead a tactile clay workshop exploring archaeology and mining as extractive disruptions to the subterranean world, inviting reflection on heritage, loss, and colonial memory through breath, touch, and sculptural practice.
Through a guided reading that incorporates touch and breath, the workshop engages participants in a sensorial exploration of replicas of burial vessels originally displayed at the British Museum. Through hands-on clay tasks, the artist will hold space for audience members to share reflections on how notions of heritage and colonial dispossession asymmetrically traverse personal and collective memory.
The workshop follows on the artists project ‘In their absence, together we mourn’ (2024): The work engages with the intersection between archaeology and mining, exploring the connection between unearthing practices, extractivism, and modernity. Through the encounter with the British Museum’s collection, the project engaged with a series of burial vessels, which were ‘reclaimed’ as 3D-scanned copies. The project reflects on how archaeological artefacts are acquired through mechanisms of colonial dispossession, drawing parallels to the gestures of mining. The extractive relationship with the earth and the mineral world manifests as modernity’s ongoing act of profanation of the subterranean realm — encompassing mineral bodies and the dead.
Screenings
16:30–17:30
Featuring short films by Sherko Abbas and Turab Shah & Arwa Aburawa, this screening offers meditations on land, trauma, and the politics of visibility.
Encounters on the Tigris by Sherko Abbas follows the artist’s journey along Iraq’s Tigris River, weaving together oral histories from communities living along its banks. Through songs, stories, and encounters, the film explores the river’s mythical past and ecological present, revealing how climate crisis, memory, and cultural identity intersect. And Still, It Remains by Turab Shah & Arwa Aburawa examines the legacy of French nuclear colonialism in Mertoutek, a village in Algeria’s Hoggar Mountains. Through poetic narration and meditative imagery, the film reflects on how radioactive violence continues to shape bodies, landscapes, and ideas of justice, while resisting the visual frameworks of the colonial gaze.
* Content warning: Please note, And Still, It Remains by Turab Shah & Arwa Aburawa includes descriptions of state violence and racism.
Live Performance
18:30–19:30
The evening performance of Where Memory Grows brings together two powerful sonic practices by Khabat Abas and Alya Al-Sultani.
Where Memory Grows, with Khabat Abas, Sherko Abbas, Alya Al-Sultani, Paola Bascón, and Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah. FormaHQ and Peveril Gardens, London. 9 August 2025. Curated by Hazel Yiran Liu and Vanture Wenqiu Zhang in response to Slow Crush by Jala Wahid, 2025. Supported by Arts Council England and Goldsmiths, University of London. Courtesy the artists. Photo: Xintong Huang
Where Memory Grows, with Khabat Abas, Sherko Abbas, Alya Al-Sultani, Paola Bascón, and Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah. FormaHQ and Peveril Gardens, London. 9 August 2025. Curated by Hazel Yiran Liu and Vanture Wenqiu Zhang in response to Slow Crush by Jala Wahid, 2025. Supported by Arts Council England and Goldsmiths, University of London. Courtesy the artists. Photo: Xintong Huang
Where Memory Grows, with Khabat Abas, Sherko Abbas, Alya Al-Sultani, Paola Bascón, and Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah. FormaHQ and Peveril Gardens, London. 9 August 2025. Curated by Hazel Yiran Liu and Vanture Wenqiu Zhang in response to Slow Crush by Jala Wahid, 2025. Supported by Arts Council England and Goldsmiths, University of London. Courtesy the artists. Photo: Xintong Huang
Stills from And Still, It Remains, Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah, 2023, Courtesy the artist.
Stills from Encounters on the Tigris, Sherko Abbas, 2022-2023, Courtesy the artist.
Artist and Curator biographies
Khabat Abas is a cellist, composer, and interdisciplinary artist from Kurdistan-Iraq. Her work explores time, space, and memory through music, everyday sounds, and noises. She delves deeply into how we experience sound, particularly in various geopolitical contexts. Abas uses her instrument beyond traditional norms improvising, composing, creating videos and sound installations, crafting cellos from diverse materials, and incorporating her body into performances. Through this approach, her work merges politics with personal expression, challenging conventional values and control.
Sherko Abbas (b. 1978, Iran) is a Kurdish-Iraqi artist and filmmaker. After living in Iran as refugees, his family returned with his family to Iraq at the age of two. He studied Fine Art in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, and earned his MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2015. Abbas’practice explores sonic and visual memory, particularly modern memory mediated through recorded materials, and engages with contemporary geopolitical realities in Iraq. Abbas’ recent exhibitions and screenings include Theatre of Operations, MoMA PS1, New York; May Flames Pave the Way for You, Arsenal Gallery, Białystok; Push Festival, Manchester; Towner International, Eastbourne; Speaking Across Mountains, The Middle East Institute, Washington D.C.; Baghdad Mon Amour, Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris; Vernacularity, Alternativa Festival, Gdansk; and Estrangement, The Showroom, London. His films have also been featured at the Independent Iraqi Film Festival (online), the 38th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin at the Louvre Auditorium, Open City Documentary Festival in London, Visit Festival at Het Bos, Antwerp, Ruya Shop in Baghdad, and Shasha Movies online.Pio Abad’s artistic practice is concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects.
Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah are an artist duo based in London. The work they create reflects on the forces which shape the communities they belong to, such as displacement, race, environmental harm and other legacies of colonialism. Their films are also guided by questions of justice and how those in the margins create vital spaces for resistance, knowledge production, and alternative ways of being. Together they founded a project called Other Cinemas which regularly hosts community screening and discussions in Brent which centre Black and non-white communities and help build solidarities by connecting struggles. They also run a year-long film school for a small group of Black and non-white artists which encourages them to learn, collaborate, create and build communities outside of institutional structures.
Alya Al-Sultani is a dramatic soprano, vocal improviser and composer working in opera, experimental and electronic music. Her work centres the themes of liberation and love.
Paola Bascón is an artist based in La Paz and Berlin. Her visual and performance work engages with histories of extractivism and the potential restoration of affective relationships with the more-than-human world. She is particularly interested in the intersection of handcraft, poetic practices and collective memory as attempts to challenge modern-colonial narratives. Weaving historical accounts and archival material with speculative storytelling and somatic activations, her work unfolds across various mediums, including textiles, ceramics, painting, video and sound, as well as participatory and pedagogical formats. The participatory works, which range from workshops to sonic experiences, engage in material and sensorial explorations hosted by landscape, objects, and bodies.
Paola graduated from Communication Design and Media Art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) in 2017 (Diplom/Masters) and is from the Art & Ecology MA (2023/24) at Goldsmiths University of London. Her work has been shown at Museum Kesselhaus Herzberge, Berlin (2024); Nunhead Cemetery, London (2024); Hypha Studios Mayfair, London (2024); Brücke Museum, Berlin (2023), PACT Zollverein, Essen (2023); 80m2 Livia Benavides, Lima (2023); Pinta PArC, Lima (2023); South London Gallery (2022); Materia Gris, La Paz (2022; )Spreepark Art Space, Berlin (2021); radialsystem, Berlin (2020); HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin (2020); Kiosko Galería, Santa Cruz de la Sierra (2020); Uferstudios, Berlin (2019); Alliance Française, La Paz (2017), Museo Nacional de Arte, La Paz (MNA) (2009), among others.
Hazel Yiran Liu (b. 2001) is a curator from China currently based in London. Hazel works at the intersection of posthumanism, interspecies ethics, and more-than-human perspectives. Her current research focuses on mourning as a generative, continuous act of care that extends across species boundaries. Through curatorial practice, she explores how new forms of connection can be rebuilt between humans and nonhuman beings. With a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary background, she is committed to developing curatorial frameworks that foster relationality, ecological attention, and multispecies solidarity
Vanture Wenqiu Zhang (b. 2000) is a curator, writer, and musician based in London. Her practice critically engages with the intersections and tensions between Eastern and Western cultural narratives, with a focus on amplifying marginalized perspectives. Zhang’s work draws on her deep engagement with music and ethnomusicology, underpinned by a comprehensive understanding of sound art, music production, and the sonic traditions of China’s ethnic minorities. Her current research delves into shamanic knowledge systems and ecological consciousness, exploring how these themes manifest within contemporary artistic practices.
Details
Saturday 9 August
14:00 - 19:30
FormaHQ & Peveril Gardens
140 Great Dover Street
London, SE1 4GW
Programme
14:00 - 16:00
Clay workshop with artist Paola Bascón
Spaces are limited, RSVP necessary
Screenings
16:30 - 17:30
Encounters on the Tigris by Sherko Abbas and And Still, It Remains by Turab Shah & Arwa Aburawa
Live Performance
18:30–19:30
The evening performance of Where Memory Grows brings together two powerful sonic practices by Khabat Abas and Alya Al-Sultani.
RSVP
Sign up to the workshop (spaces limited)
Sign up to the screenings & performance
Where Memory Grows is curated by MFA Curating students Hazel Yiran Liu and Vanture Wenqiu Zhang, in direct response to Jala Wahid's Slow Crush. The programme is a collaboration between Forma and Goldsmiths, University of London, and is supported by Goldsmiths Exhibitions Hub.
Access
FormaHQ is located on the groundfloor of Peveril Garden studios with a wheelchair accessible, all-gender toilet available. Peveril Gardens, our rooftop garden, is accessible via a lift through Peveril House. Please speak to a member of staff upon arrival, and they will provide lift access.