An Evening with Slow Crush
An Evening with Slow Crush:
Screening and in-conversation with Jala Wahid and Dr Edwin Coomasaru
Thursday 29 October 2026
18:30-21:30
FormaHQ
140 Great Dover Street
London, SE1 4GW
All welcome, RSVP here
Access
FormaHQ is located on the ground floor of Peveril Garden studios with a wheelchair accessible, all-gender toilet available. Peveril Gardens, our rooftop garden, is currently not wheelchair accessible pending repairs to the lift.
An Evening with Slow Crush:
Screening and in-conversation with Jala Wahid and Dr Edwin Coomasaru
Thursday 29 October 2026
18.30-21.30
FormaHQ, London
All welcome, RSVP here
Join us for an evening reflecting on Jala Wahid’s first public sculpture commission — Slow Crush — which launched at FormaHQ’s Peveril Gardens in summer 2025.
To celebrate Slow Crush’s presence at FormaHQ over the past year, we will be hosting an in-conversation event with the artist and Dr Edwin Coomasaru. Together, they will discuss Wahid’s ongoing research and the making of the work, considering the histories, politics and intimacies embedded within it, and the ways that sculpture can give new life to contested narratives.
The conversation will be accompanied by a screening of Wahid’s film I Love Ancient Baby (2023), an early exploration of the themes that would later inform Slow Crush. The film speculates on the affective lives of ancient objects and their possible imagining beyond the institutional structures that contain and define them.
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.
Jala Wahid, Slow Crush, 2025. Peveril Gardens, FormaHQ, London. Commissioned and produced by Forma and supported by The Ampersand Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation and Arts Council England. Courtesy the artist and Forma. Photo: Forma.
Jala Wahid, Slow Crush, 2025. Peveril Gardens, FormaHQ, London. Commissioned and produced by Forma and supported by The Ampersand Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation and Arts Council England. Courtesy the artist and Forma. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
Jala Wahid, Slow Crush, 2025. Peveril Gardens, FormaHQ, London. Commissioned and produced by Forma and supported by The Ampersand Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation and Arts Council England. Courtesy the artist and Forma. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
Jala Wahid, Slow Crush, 2025. Peveril Gardens, FormaHQ, London. Commissioned and produced by Forma and supported by The Ampersand Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation and Arts Council England. Courtesy the artist and Forma. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
Jala Wahid, Slow Crush, 2025. Peveril Gardens, FormaHQ, London. Commissioned and produced by Forma and supported by The Ampersand Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation and Arts Council England. Courtesy the artist and Forma. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
Jala Wahid, Slow Crush, 2025. Peveril Gardens, FormaHQ, London. Commissioned and produced by Forma and supported by The Ampersand Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation and Arts Council England. Courtesy the artist and Forma. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
Jala Wahid, Slow Crush, 2025. Peveril Gardens, FormaHQ, London. Commissioned and produced by Forma and supported by The Ampersand Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation and Arts Council England. Courtesy the artist and Forma. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
Image: Jala Wahid, Slow Crush, 2025. Peveril Gardens, FormaHQ, London. Commissioned and produced by Forma and supported by The Ampersand Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation and Arts Council England. Courtesy the artist and Forma. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
Wahid’s large-scale sculpture revivifies the remains of the ‘Hasanlu Lovers’ — two ancient male skeletons discovered at the archaeological site of Hasanlu, in modern day eastern Kurdistan, who appear to have held onto each other in the face of the violent destruction of the city around 800 BCE. Rather than treating the pair as archaeological specimens, Wahid reimagines them as intimate subjects, bringing their embrace into the present and asking what it means to reclaim histories that have been shaped, classified and displaced through colonial systems of knowledge.
Standing over two metres tall, Slow Crush takes the form of a fleshy-pink fibreglass sculpture, its two skeletal bodies entwined in a heart-like gesture. Emerging from the earth of Peveril Gardens, the work sits amongst resilient, self-seeding plants and responds to the changing ecology of its urban surroundings.
For Wahid, the Hasanlu Lovers also speak to the fractured geographies of Kurdish history. Excavated in 1973, the skeletons have subsequently been situated within competing narratives of archaeology, national identity and cultural ownership. Slow Crush draws these tensions into the contemporary landscape of Bermondsey, connecting histories of excavation and displacement with the lived experiences of diaspora, migration and the politics of how histories are remembered.
This event offers an opportunity to revisit Slow Crush after over a year of its presence in Peveril Gardens, and to reflect with the artist on the research, conversations and questions that have shaped the work.
The project was commissioned and produced by Forma, and generously supported by The Ampersand Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation, and Arts Council England.
Events in the public programme have been supported by the North Southwark Environment Trust (NSET) and Goldsmiths University of London through an ongoing collaboration with their MFA Curating course.
Jala Wahid works across sculpture, film, sound, and installation. Her practice explores the emotive potential of material and politics relating to systems of power, the legacy of colonialism and their repercussions within personal histories and beyond. Her work seeks to establish a counter-narrative to colonial and diasporic rhetoric, bringing together contested histories and poetic expression. She examines the complexities of nationalism, history, iconography, and methods of archiving and existence.
Jala Wahid lives and works in London, UK. Her solo exhibitions include Ungovernable Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna (2026), Pretend History Niru Ratnam, London (2024), I Love Ancient Baby GAK Bremen (2023), Mock Kings Kunstverein Freiburg (2023), Conflagration Tramway, Glasgow (2023) and BALTIC Gateshead (2022). Recent group exhibitions include Phantom Sculpture MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2024), BLINK Trond Mohn Art Collection Stavanger Art Museum, Norway (2023), TESTAMENT Goldsmiths CCA, London (2022), Mere Skyn CAPC Musée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux (2020), Searching the Sky for Rain SculptureCenter, New York (2019), Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance Arnolfini, Bristol (2019), De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill (2019), and Nottingham Contemporary (2018). From 2012 to 2019, Wahid was co-editor of SALT. Magazine. Her work is held in private and institutional collections worldwide, most recently at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, and FRAC Grand Large, Dunkirk.
Dr Edwin Coomasaru is a Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Bristol and Reviews Editor for Visual Culture in Britain. A historian of modern and contemporary British art, his research examines relationships between empire and ecology in visual culture. Coomasaru is completing a book on Queer Ecologies and Abundant Aesthetics in Sri Lankan Art, supported by a Mid-Career Fellowship from Yale University’s Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and a Visiting Fellowship from University College London. He has written for Art History, Third Text, Oxford Art Journal, British Art Studies, Visual Culture in Britain, The Irish Review, Irish Studies Review; as well as numerous edited books, exhibition catalogues, and art criticism.
An Evening with Slow Crush:
Screening and in-conversation with Jala Wahid and Dr Edwin Coomasaru
Thursday 29 October 2026
18:30-21:30
FormaHQ
140 Great Dover Street
London, SE1 4GW
All welcome, RSVP here
Access
FormaHQ is located on the ground floor of Peveril Garden studios with a wheelchair accessible, all-gender toilet available. Peveril Gardens, our rooftop garden, is currently not wheelchair accessible pending repairs to the lift.