Uncanny Knowledge: Unsettling the Architectures of Silencing

Event

An artwork depicting a black and white village with an eruption of yellow in the middle and streaks of green on the sides. — Arkady Zaides, The Cloud, Photo by Giuseppe Follacchio

Sat 7 Nov – Sun 8 Nov, 11am–5pm

Co-curated by Elham Puriya Mehr and Fereshte Moosavi, Uncanny Knowledge: Unsettling the Architectures of Silencing is a two-day international assembly at Nottingham Contemporary that brings together artists, researchers, and communities to explore the potentialities of sound, vibration, listening, and embodiment as forces of resistance, collective knowledge-making, and social transformation.

Emerging amid escalating wars, forced displacements, ecological devastation, and worsening global crises, Uncanny Knowledge examines the architectures of silencing as forceful, interconnected economic, geopolitical, genocidal, and ideological matters. From the destruction of civilian infrastructures to the suppression of dissent and the erasure of cultural memory, silencing extends beyond the restriction of speech to the dismantling of the spaces and relations that sustain collective life. Within these conditions, the Assembly explores how sound, through its vibrational and relational potential, might mobilise suppressed hopes and traumatised memories, opening possibilities for resistance, alternative knowledges, and the reimagining of communal life.

Uncanny Knowledge approaches sound not merely as a medium of expression, but as a relational and transformative force capable of unsettling established regimes of knowledge and activating possibilities that remain unheard, unrecognised, or unrealised. Through vibration and embodied listening, the Assembly asks: How might artistic practices mobilise what has been silenced? And what forms of knowledge emerge when bodies become sites for resonance?

Through public performative presentations and collective conversations, the Assembly invites local and international participants to explore how sonic encounters might generate alternative forms of knowledge while opening spaces for collective imagination from which new futures might emerge.

Programme:

Day One
November 7th, 11am to 5pm

Silence and love as a resistance to being heard wrong
Salomé Voegelin (Writer, researcher and practitioner)

This is a curatorial performance, which means it is a presentation that does not read a paper but performs ideas by playing sounds and reciting poetry; by reading texts and proposing we perform text-scores, moving and standing still. Using this format I aim to work with the notion of uncanny knowledge in relation to silence, being silenced and love. I will consider the notion of silence not as a means to be inaudible but to be audible otherwise. This is a response to the volume of power occupying all legible frequencies and thus determining authority, rationality and truth. When silence, as an allegory for the not heard rather than the not sounding, can offer another possibility: moving sidewise, and off track, into a different expression and another language, which can also be loud.

I will use love as an irrational force of being together to try and imagine such a language, from the distillate of our being as always being irrational rather than being reduced to definition and measurement, semantic expectations and political grammars, historically identified and geographically placed.

Relational Listening
Golnoosh Heshmati (Artist, researcher, and curator)

In this presentation, Golnoosh Heshmati will elaborate on two main threads evolving around different ways of adopting listening methodologies in her practice. One reflects on a personally entangled exploration of a research project that emerged over the past few years through questioning, engaging, distancing, and coming close in relation to the building she grew up in, in Tehran. The latter part of the presentation will introduce Khamoosh, focusing on a collaborative and community-driven artistic research project evolving and gathering around sound and listening.

What Is Left to Listen to Now is the title of Golnoosh Heshmati's recent artistic research project, which has partly evolved into a sound installation and performance. In this presentation, she will share the research through storytelling, tracing processes of listening, unlearning, and performing the everyday archives encountered throughout the project. The work examines how the "disturbed ecologies" of personal life, intertwined with the social and political landscape of recent decades, manifest in relationships with the structures we inhabit, from the buildings we live in to our own bodies. Bones and pipes, trunks and roots: each carrying movements and resistances that form haunted landscapes, patterns that persist and repeat, while also seeking a way to break free.

Flood/Fume (Online)
Salar Mameni (Artist, art historian and educator)

In this talk, Salar Mameni discusses the extreme heat waves, flooding and cyclones that have affected the southern coastal regions of Pakistan, with the most recent flood occurring in summer 2022, through the work of the contemporary Pakistani artist Zahra Malkani. The talk centers Malkani’s soundscapes and multi-media visual/textual presentations of spiritual, activist, and mourning practices of coastal communities in the Makran region of Balochestan as an entry point into a conversation about climate disasters, extractive economies, aesthetic practices, and the current war in the Persian Gulf. Through the notion of the “oceanic feeling,” a term Malkani uses for her audio-visual recordings, Mameni discusses the significance of sound and Zikr for spiritual and political work of memory making. The presentation focuses on water as an elemental carrier of sound and hence the talk offers water as a sonic event that holds history and memory together. In Malkani's sonic artistic practice with communities along the Makran coast, water is also held to be sacred and the dwelling of syncretic gods. Mameni's talk asks about the place of these sacred waterways in the context of militarized geological disasters in the Gulf region. Can the sacred and the disastrous coexist and what do the polluted geologies hold in their geo-historical memories?

Day Two
November 8th 11am to 5pm

ThruMmming with Knowledge
Irit Rogoff (Theorist, educator, and curator)

My subject is the conjunction of ‘research, ‘knowledge Production’ and ‘creative Practice’ as we are seeing it unfold today across so many art forms. To try and capture the synchronicity of embodied processes of knowledge production, of how research is lived out rather than utilised, I am addressing the work of dancer and choreographer Arkady Zaides. The notion of thruMmming I am in search of is both epistemic and embodied. It’s a form of ‘Being with Knowledge’ that does not reach conclusions or seal knowledge off temporally within known disciplinary economies, it is an understanding of Jean-Luc Nancy’s insistence that “We are Meaning”.

Zaides works under the rubric of “Documentary Choreography’ This term refers to a type of choreographic work that incorporates documents (such as interviews, testimonies, video materials, archival information, etc.) as sources of factual information which can be used to question and intervene in social and political realities.

Even more invested in an investigation of gestural codes, and not just political rhetoric, is Zaides' Archive of 2014, a work in collaboration with ‘B’Tselem: Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories’ .

The Unheard Call of the Nakba (Online)
Ayreen Anastas & René Gabri (Artists and researchers)

There are moments in shared existence where everything seems revocable, because it must. What is a calling, a vocation? And what is a recalling, a re-vocation? How did the urgent call of Palestine not get heard in its many iterations? What does Palestine call for? How did art, music, film respond to this call? Can we speak of the silence or the silencing of artists as it pertains to the Nakba? Can we recall this call? Can we revoke the vocations of art in the planetary regime that formed to perpetrate the Nakba? If the Nakba has been as much an aesthetic regime as it has been political, economic, juridical, martial, educational, psychological, cultural … what have been and continue to be the forces obstructing our capacity to hear this call? What if noise is a greater threat than silence for charting our ways out of the genocidal culture that was imposed in the name of ‘after’ committing Nakba? What does struggle, yet alone art look and sound like on the paths of abolishing all that stands for the perpetration and denial of ongoing Nakba?

Khamoshi Behtar: Sight and Sound of Silence (Online)
Hamid Dabashi (Writer, educator and researcher)

The word khamush in Persian is a quite strange word. It means both (1) to turn a light off so it becomes dark and (2) to stop talking so one becomes silent. So that khamush means both silent and dark. Khamosh ey ashegh e majnun — Rumi says in a famous ghazal, “Be quiet oh bewitched lover . . .” Meanwhile the phrase “Cheragh ha ra man khamush mikonam/I turn off the lights “ is the title of a vastly popular contemporary novel by Zoya Pirzad. So the same word khamush means both to become silent and to turn off the light and not for darkness. The word thus embodies a decisively bold claim on a phenomenology of sight and sound that can only become evident when one pauses speaking or stops seeing and becomes quiet and dark. But, and thus the paradox of the mixed and uncanny metaphor, the silence is full of sound and that darkness is full of visual commotions. This paradox was perhaps best captured in Parviz Tanavoli’s now legendary series of sculptures known as Heech/Nothing, which frightfully captured just about everything.

Elham Puriya Mehr is an artist, curator, writer, and educator based in Vancouver, BC. She holds a BA and MA from Tehran University of Art and a PhD in Art Research from Alzahra University. She completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Advanced Practices programme at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on the potentialities of social spaces as alternative atmospheres for learning and knowledge-making. Over the past eighteen years, Puriya Mehr has worked internationally across curatorial, educational, and research contexts. Her practice encompasses exhibitions, public and socially engaged art projects, and collaborative research. Recent projects include co-curating Archipelago of Whispers at 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi (2026); curating Unfolding Desire Assembly at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2026); and co-curating Unfolding Desire at Trieste Contemporanea (2025). In 2024, she served as Artistic Director of the international symposium Contact Zone in Tehran and presented her curatorial research project The Third Space: The Affective Atmosphere of Coffeehouses at Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver; Framer Framed, Amsterdam; Void Art Centre, Derry; SAHA, Istanbul; and AiR Trieste. Other selected projects include Live Assembly: Repair and Care for LIVE Biennale, Vancouver (2021), where she led the curatorial team.

Fereshte Moosavi is an independent curator, educator and researcher based in London. She holds a PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge from the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the founder of The Curatorial, in Other Words, a pedagogical and research project initiated in Tehran in 2015, and has organised the Tehran Curatorial Symposium since 2017 in collaboration with Charsoo Honar. Her scholarly practice explores the potentials of curatorial practice as a mode of inquiry, learning and social engagement, with a particular interest in alternative pedagogies, institutional formations and artists’ practices. She has edited and contributed to books and published essays emerging from these areas of research. She has curated research-based exhibitions internationally and was previously Art Director and Curator at the MOP Foundation, London (2011–2018). Her academic engagement includes teaching at Goldsmiths and the University of Essex, and currently supervising PhD research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, while also online teaching at Shamseh Academy in Tehran.

Ayreen Anastas, her name her birthplace her birth time her cities her studies her thinking her movements her friendships her communities her communisms her languages her words her thoughts her their it together between lines connecting not a she separate from the sources of all life the sea the river the mountain the rock the tree the grass the cloud the any other there is there here where in Palestine a genocide takes place what life a biography can say or mean today when time after time a life.

Rene Gabri is a story of a child whose tribe leaves home. It’s not a voluntary journey. They feel forced and maybe already a little betrayed by a memory that is still haunting them? A mother sewing a small gold pendant inside a red gilet? Was this gesture from that memory? Whose memory was it? The red gilet, the pendant, the bracelet with the name Ռենե engraved, the smell of fresh baked Lavash, Barbari, Sangak, the new school uniforms, bonfires of revolution, Balal on a crowded street corner, an infinite longing for a smell or a taste that cannot be replaced, a grey fall, and then the long march of or toward oblivion, the resistance, the onslaught, the losses, the mounting losses, a past without future … the bounteous mountains, the persistence, the existence, the insistence on, the search for an otherwise, i.e., art.

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, the oldest and most prestigious Chair in his field. He has taught and delivered lectures in many North and Latin American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities. He is a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, as well as a founding member of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. He has written more than two dozen books, edited four volumes, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews in major scholarly and peer reviewed journals on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). A selected sample of his writing is co-edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, The World is my Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader (Transaction 2010).

Golnoosh Heshmati is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and curator. Her practice approaches listening as a method for engaging with archives and site-specific research, exploring how histories, material processes, and forms of transmission emerge over time. Working across sound, text, ceramics, installation, and collective formats, she develops projects that trace ephemeral remnants and peripheral narratives through spatial, embodied, and participatory encounters. She co-founded Rabt in Tehran in 2020, a nomadic space dedicated to community engagement through sonic practices, and is a member and facilitator of Khamoosh, an artistic research community exploring conservation and restoration through the sonic heritage of Iran.

Salar Mameni is an artist, art historian and associate professor of comparative ethnic studies and affiliated faculty in the History of Art Department at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2023), which received honorable mention from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present in 2024 and Outstanding Achievement in Media, Performance, and Visual Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2025. Mameni is currently completing a second book project titled Blood of Tulips: Toward an Ecology of Martyrdom. Mameni's essays have appeared in scholarly journals Representations, Qui Parle, Catalyst, Ramus, Resilience, Signs, Women & Performance, Critical Ethnic Studies, Visual Studies, Routledge Companion to Art, Visual Culture and Climate Change, and Al-Raida, among others.

Irit Rogoff is a theorist, curator, and organiser who writes at the intersections of the critical, the political, and contemporary art practices. Rogoff is a professor at Goldsmiths College, London University, in the department of Visual Cultures, which she founded in 2002. Her work across a series of new "think tank" Ph.D. programmes at Goldsmiths (Research Architecture, Curatorial/Knowledge) is focusing on the possibility of locating, moving, and exchanging knowledges across professional practices, self-generated forums, academic institutions, and individual enthusiasms. Her publications include Museum Culture (1997), Terra Infirma - Geography's Visual Culture (2001), A.C.A.D.E.M.Y (2006), Unbounded - Limits Possibilities (2008), and the forthcoming Looking Away - Participating Singularities, Ontological Communities (2009). Curatorial work includes De-Regulation with the work of Kutlug Ataman (2005-8), A.C.A.D.E.M.Y (2006), and Summit - Non Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture (2007).

Salomé Voegelin is a writer, researcher and practitioner engaged in listening as a socio-political practice. She writes articles and papers, books, texts and text-scores for performance and publication. Her book Uncurating Sound: Knowledge with Voice and Hands (2023) moves curation through the double negative of not not to ‘uncuration’: untethering knowledge from the expectations of reference and a canonical frame, and reconsidering art as political not in its message or aim, but by the way it confronts the institution, while Unperforming the Dream House (2023) discusses the impact of the American dream of the 1960s and 70s on the nightmare of a present world. She is Professor of Sound at the University of the Arts, London, UK as well as at the Bern Academy of the Arts, Switzerland.

Give What You Can

Entry to our exhibitions, events, fairs and our family activities is free but we need your support. Your donations make it possible to keep doing everything we do: from our world-leading exhibitions to our activities for families, young people and schools. With your support we can continue making a difference to the cultural, educational and social life of Nottingham and the East Midlands.

Please support us with a donation and register for Gift Aid to add 25% at no extra cost to you.

Access

Find information about getting here and our building access and facilities here.

This event will be held in The Space.

Speakers will use microphones.

This event is wheelchair accessible.

If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing info@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750.

Nottingham Contemporary