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Auto Italia is an artist-run organisation and project space that commissions new work, bringing together international networks of artists committed to the development of emerging practices and discussions in contemporary art.

17/06/2026

Last week to see ‘Noorani Metal Sound’ by Zahra Malkani!

We’re open from Thursday to Sunday, 12– 5pm. The exhibition continues until 21 June.

Featuring new sound work, sculpture, installation, and moving image, the exhibition draws on mysticism, ecological resistance movements and feminist aural practices to explore the intersections of the sonic and the sacred across Pakistan’s heavily exploited coastal and delta regions. Drawing on over five years of research, ‘Noorani Metal Sound’ brings together Malkani’s field recordings and archival work tracing oral and sonic traditions of lament, devotion and resistance.

New sound works weave together lullabies, war cries, stories of martyrdom and protest songs with devotional laments that reverberate across temporal and geographic thresholds – from the Battle of Karbala at the Euphrates River some 1,400 years ago, to the ongoing Baloch insurgency along Pakistan’s Makran Coast. The exhibition opens with ‘Noorani Echo Sound’, a three-part cassette box set documenting the artist’s expansive audio archive, collected between 2020 and 2025, alongside a publication of fieldnotes, transcripts, conversations and translations.

‘Noorani Metal Sound’ is commissioned and produced by Auto Italia, with support from Arts Council England, Cockayne Grants for the Arts, the Embassy of the Netherlands, ZVM Rangoonwala Foundation, La Becque and Stroom Den Haag.

zahra malkani
Arts Council England
Cockayne Foundation
🇳🇱 Dutch Embassy in the UK 🇬🇧
La Becque | Artist Residency
Stroom Den Haag

Image: Zahra Malkani, ‘Noorani Metal Sound’, 2026. Installation view at Auto Italia, London, UK. Courtesy the artist and Auto Italia. Photographer: Jack Elliot Edwards.

10/06/2026

Amrita Dhallu reviews Zahra Malkani’s solo exhibition ‘Noorani Metal Sound’ for Art Monthly issue no. 497, June 2026.

“In ‘Noorani Metal Sound’, memory, land and bodies – both living and passed, human and non-human – are fused into a crescendo of sonic entanglement as women’s calls synchronise to sound out a chorus from the core of the earth.”

Follow the link in our bio to read the full article.⁠

‘Noorani Metal Sound’ continues until 21 June, open Thursday to Sunday, 12 - 5pm.⁠

Image: Zahra Malkani, ‘Noorani Metal Sound’, 2026. Installation view at Auto Italia, London, UK. Courtesy the artist and Auto Italia. Photographer: Jack Elliot Edwards.

06/06/2026

Join us on 13 June at 5-7pm as artists Fatima Lahham and Bint Mbareh present a performance-based and participatory workshop exploring metal, water, non-linear time, live archiving and vocal versioning.

This session focuses on the cassette tape as a medium that can echo the departed (because of migration, strife or death) and haunt the present. Fatima and Bint Mbareh explore some of the sonic possibilities of the cassette tape with a performance aiming to bend what is in the present and what is past, palimpsestic histories written in multitudes, precious in a way, but constantly erased for new urgencies, trailing behind them a mosaic specific to each improvised moment.

After the performance, audience members will be invited into a series of shared vocalisations and informal reflections on the recording-listening-sounding process. Non-musicians are especially encouraged to participate. The vocalisations will focus on how participants leak, rust, flood and burst, thinking with water, metal, and the ways we experience and express rage.

This event is the fifth and final in Metal on Metal, a public programme series curated by researcher, writer and sound practitioner Syma Tariq. Full programme listings can be found on our website.

‘Metal on Metal’ is commissioned and produced by Auto Italia, with support from the ZVM Rangoonwala Foundation.

Photographer: Jayen Shukla

05/06/2026

Final weeks to see ‘Noorani Metal Sound’ by Zahra Malkani!

We’re open Thursday to Sunday, 12– 5pm. The exhibition closes on 21 June.⁠

Featuring new sound work, sculpture, installation, and moving image, the exhibition draws on mysticism, ecological resistance movements and feminist aural practices to explore the intersections of the sonic and the sacred across Pakistan’s heavily exploited coastal and delta regions. Emerging from over five years of ongoing research, Noorani Metal Sound brings together Malkani’s field recordings and archival work tracing oral and sonic traditions of lament, devotion and resistance.

The exhibition is commissioned and produced by Auto Italia, with support from Arts Council England, Cockayne Grants for the Arts, the Embassy of the Netherlands, ZVM Rangoonwala Foundation, La Becque and Stroom Den Haag.

Image: Zahra Malkani, ‘Noorani Metal Sound’, 2026. Installation view at Auto Italia, London, UK. Courtesy the artist and Auto Italia. Photographer: Jack Elliot Edwards.

03/06/2026

ANNOUNCEMENT: Auto Italia is delighted to present ‘Sensual / Mutual’, the first major institutional solo exhibition in the UK by Del LaGrace Volcano. Surfacing unseen bodies of work from the 1970s and 80s, the exhibition focuses on Volcano’s time in San Francisco and Santa Fe, tracing q***r, feminist, leather d**e, gender-variant, and land-based communities in the process of making themselves visible.

Often described as a legendary d**e photographer, Volcano is not only a pioneering voice of their generation, but one of the most urgent artists working today. Across more than five decades, their work has traced the political, social, and cultural shifts that have shaped LGBTQ+ histories, from the aftermath of Stonewall and the emergence of le***an feminism, through Section 28 and the AIDS crisis, to the present-day rise in anti-trans and far-right ideology.

Developed during periods of intense political and social struggle in the United States, the works presented trace the emergence of insurgent q***r spaces, collective imaginaries, and communities in revolt. From bars to communal housing to land-based feminist collectives, the exhibition maps a geography of q***r world-making, surfacing how such spaces functioned not only as sites of refuge, but as laboratories for new social forms, where kinship, desire, labour, and political commitment were continually redefined.

‘Sensual / Mutual’ is commissioned by Auto Italia, with support from Arts Council England. It will be presented alongside a sister exhibition, ‘Love Bites Back’, commissioned and presented by Edinburgh Art Festival 2026 between 14–30 August.

Image: Del LaGrace Volcano. ‘SCOTTS BAR: VIC & MANDY, SAN FRANCISCO’, 1981. Courtesy the artist.

28/05/2026

‘Noorani Metal Sound’ by Zahra Malkani is open Thursday to Sunday, 12 – 5pm and runs until 21 June.⁠

The exhibition is commissioned and produced by Auto Italia, with support from Arts Council England, Cockayne Grants for the Arts, the Embassy of the Netherlands, ZVM Rangoonwala Foundation, La Becque and Stroom Den Haag.

Image: Zahra Malkani, ‘Noorani Metal Sound’, 2026. Installation view at Auto Italia, London, UK. Courtesy the artist and Auto Italia. Photographer: Jack Elliot Edwards.

20/05/2026

Book Now: Join us on Thursday 18th June, 6:30 - 8:30pm for ‘From the Same Night - DIY Ephemera Toolkit’, a zine-making workshop with artist Reuben Brown.

‘From the Same Night - DIY Ephemera Toolkit’ is a portable archive and a DIY-ephemera-making toolkit designed as part of “club [construction]”, an ongoing research project by Reuben Brown.

Participants will be provided with a toolkit containing a curated selection of reproduced club culture artefacts: handmade flyers pulled from walls, floor plans, archival photographs, press clippings, found graphics and other traces of nightlife communities.

While each toolkit contains more or less the same selection, the acts of cutting, collaging, annotating and reconfiguring produce distinct and deeply personal reimaginings of the archive that may be playful, narrative, critical or abstract. The resulting zines form a temporary collective record: a set of parallel interpretations that speak to the multiplicity of q***r memory, the impossibility of a single authoritative narrative, and the ways nightlife is remembered, forgotten, retold, misremembered and rebuilt.

This event is free to attend and will take place at Auto Italia. To register, follow the link in our bio.

19/05/2026

Paul Rekret reviews Zahra Malkani’s solo exhibition ‘Noorani Metal Sound’ for The Wire.

“With Shahana Rajani, Malkani has spent the past decade developing Karachi LaJamia, a nomadic pedagogical project of walks, listening sessions and oral history, that responds to an increasingly enclosed and militarised city in which universities and cultural spaces are surveilled and securitised.

Noorani Metal Sound translates this method into exhibition form. On the cassettes, music gives way to Malkani’s own voice offering context, then back to song; the archive is more expansive than a single listening can take in. The recordings were mostly made on a phone, a tool small enough to pass unnoticed in spaces where a camera attracts attention and where a notebook can be confiscated or become evidence. The fragments remain partial and fugitive, but what coheres over the course of the exhibition is a rigorous and elegant entanglement of place and song, intimacy and struggle.”

Image: Zahra Malkani, ‘Noorani Metal Sound’, 2026. Installation view at Auto Italia, London, UK. Courtesy the artist and Auto Italia. Photographer: Jack Elliot Edwards.

15/05/2026

Next Wednesday: Join us on Wednesday 20th May, from 6pm for ‘how to cannibalise the dead’, a participatory performance with Palestinian artist Izdihar Afyouni.

Exploring testimony, consent, authorship and the circulation of stories across cultural borders, the performance considers how first-hand oral testimonies operate within institutional frameworks, and how they are consumed, reshaped or used to produce value.

Participants are invited to submit or prepare a testimony in advance, though this is optional. You are welcome to attend without preparing anything and will not be asked to share a personal testimony.

Please arrive from 6pm for a 6:30pm start.

This event is free to attend. To register, follow the link in our bio.
studio

Image: Izdihar Afyouni, ‘2024’, 240 x 140 cm, oil and blood on linen, 2024.

13/05/2026

Book Now: Join us on 6 June at 3pm for ‘A falling’ – death and cadence with Zoé Samudzi.

The activist and writer shares insights from her scholarly research, primarily concerned with the Ovaherero and Nama genocide and its afterlives, settler colonialism in southern Africa, and coloniality across the continent more broadly.

Framed by the concept of cadence – derived from the Latin cadere (‘to fall’) that describes the sense of closure at the end of a musical phrase – Syma Tariq will host a discussion on warring modes of historical repetition through the sacred and the profane, incantation and the performance of language as power, and the never-present tense of genocide.

This event is the fifth in a public programme series curated by researcher, writer and sound practitioner Syma Tariq, and is supported by the La Becque Artist Residency Programme. Full listings for ‘Metal on Metal’ can be found on our website.

‘Metal on Metal’ is commissioned and produced by Auto Italia, with support from the ZVM Rangoonwala Foundation.

Address

44 Bonner Road
London
E29JS

Opening Hours

Thursday	12pm - 5pm
Friday	12pm - 5pm
Saturday	12pm - 5pm
Sunday	12pm - 5pm

Telephone

+442089834115

Website

http://www.autoitaliasoutheast.org/

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