S&F Public Event: Against Erasure: A Collective Practice of Listening

5.45pm: Doors Open

6pm-8pm: Sound exhibition (The Red Room). Drinks and nibbles (The Green Room).

An intimate, spatial sound exhibition of a of real life, testimonies from women in Iran experiencing the trauma of violent oppression and war in Iran in recent months. The testimonies were collected by Dr Saba Zavarei, who led a collaborative performance and recording with some of the members of the Subjectivity and Feminisms Research Group: Dr Lana Locke (Convenor), Prof Sarah Fdili-Alaoui (editor/producer), Adrián Coto Rodríguez, Dr Henrietta Simson, Dr Echo Xie, Charlotte Yao, and Dr Sharon Young.

As Saba says "These words come from lives that have no shelter from the state’s brutality and violence that does not tolerate their freedom, their agency, their voice. For this gathering, you are invited to offer their stories a temporary resting place, through listening."

7pm: Live Performance by Dr Saba Zavarei, The Green Room, Chelsea College of Arts

Performance poem by Saba responding to a decade in exile and the embodied experience of witnessing from a distance. This functions as both framing and vulnerability: a located voice rather than an authoritative overview.

7.15-8pm: Group discussion, The Green Room, Chelsea College of Arts

The second half will move into a collective discussion connecting these acts of listening and witnessing to feminist impact beyond the university — considering attention, presence, remembering, and embodied gathering as political practice. This format proposes a temporary assembly structured around shared listening rather than representation.

8.30pm: Doors Close

Dr Saba Zavarei is an artist, researcher and urbanist. At the intersection of performance studies and urban studies, she explores the relationship between bodies and public spaces, and how bodies produce, use or transgress their everyday spaces. She is an associate lecturer at Goldsmiths, founding editor at Konesh, and a visiting research fellow at IAS, UCL. Her forthcoming book (Cambridge University Press, 2026), based on her doctoral thesis, explores how Iranian women create emancipatory spaces through transgressive everyday performances.

Subjectivity and Feminisms Research Group (S&F)

The Subjectivity and Feminisms Research Group examines how visual art, performance and research practices engage with gender, race, sexuality, disability and age, and how such work can shape public discourse and social change.

It's membership is open to UAL staff, students, alumni, and guest collaborators. It is co-convened by Dr Lana Locke and Rosemary Cronin. Current members include: Dr Denise Ackerl, Cécile Emmanuelle Borra, Adrián Coto Rodríguez, Fran Cottell, Prof Sarah Fdili-Alaoui, Dr Catherine Maffioletti, Nina O'Reilly, Dr Susanna Round, Dr Henrietta Simson, Gabriela Vergara Toro, Shuwen Wang, Dr Echo Xie, Charlotte Yao, and Dr Sharon Young.

Cover image: (c) Dr Lana Locke