Thursday 29 January 2026, 14.30–17.00
Co-chaired by Jacob Mallinson Bird and Jacob Kingsbury Downs, in collaboration with TORCH Performance Research Hub (Gascia Ouzounian, Oreet Ashery, Alex Coke)
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Agenda
14.30–15.45—Panel 1 & Live Performance: Voice / Voicings
TRANS VOICES: ILĀ and Coda Nicolaeff
(moderator: Jacob Kingsbury Downs)
Exploring the intersections of trans vocality and posthuman subjectivity, this panel considers how trans and queer artists reimagine the voice as a site of resistance and transformation. The panel examines how voice can exceed the boundaries of the self, framing it not only as sound but as a mode of activism, embodiment, and relation.
At the centre of the panel is an immersive live performance, featuring elements of TRANS VOICES’ recent sound installation work UN/BOUND, first presented as part of the collective exhibition FEEL THE SOUND at the Barbican Centre, London. This vocal work harnesses novel AI and quantum technologies to transform individual voices into virtual chorality, meditating on the figure of the voice as a medium of expression and on deep listening practices as catalysts for social change.
15.45–16.00—Break
16.00–17.00—Panel 2: Performing the Trans Body / Embodied Archives
Liz Rosenfeld and Rose Wood
(moderator: Jacob Mallinson Bird)
Focusing on corporeality, this session considers the body as archive, medium, and contested site. Through discussions of performance art, film, and writing, the panel explores flesh as a collaborative material, interrogating the limits of what bodies can hold, expose, or expel. From cruising methodologies to acts of extremity and endurance, the panel reflects on how trans and queer performance troubles received accounts of memory and embodiment, negotiating power, presence, and the ethics of taking up space.
17.00—Drinks Reception
featuring special guest intervention
Biographies
Oreet Ashery (she/they) is an award-winning visual artist and an educator whose practice navigates established, institutional, and grassroots contexts. Their work engages with bodies, worldbuilding, interspecies relations, gender, and technology. Ashery’s practice manifests through distinct multiplatform projects that span video, image, performance, and assemblage. Characterised by the use of speculative fiction and humour, their work often occupies utopian, discursive and incongruous spaces that question the conditions of art production. They are Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Oxford, where they are also Director of the MFA Fine Art at The Ruskin School of Art and Director of Studies in Fine Art at Exeter College.
Jacob Mallinson Bird (he/him) is Lecturer in Music at The Queen’s and Somerville Colleges, University of Oxford, and Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge. Jacob’s current research focuses on noise music in queer contexts, understanding isomorphic relationship between noise and queer theories. His doctoral work interrogated ideas of voice in drag lip-sync performance, supported by ethnographic work with five London-based drag queens; this work is to be published as a monograph with Bloomsbury Academic in 2026. His work has also been published in Sound Studies, Contemporary Music Review, and Riffs, with a forthcoming chapter with Routledge.
Jacob Kingsbury Downs (he/him) is Departmental Lecturer in Music at the University of Oxford, where he serves as Chair of Faculty in the Faculty of Music and Organising Tutor in Music at Lady Margaret Hall. His research examines how digital sound technologies transform experiences of intimacy and connection in the twenty-first century, challenging traditional boundaries between private and public life. His work spans popular music studies, sound studies, philosophy, science and technology studies, and empirical approaches to music consumption. His first monograph is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic. He makes regular media appearances and, in 2024, was named a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker.
Gascia Ouzounian (she/her) is an historian and theorist of sound. She has published widely on topics that range from sonic memories of genocide to the sonic undercommons, counterlistening, and gender in sound art. Her forthcoming book The Trembling City (MIT Press 2026) explores cities as vibrational territories shaped by warfare, occupation, and mass violence. Ouzounian is Associate Professor of Music at Oxford; academic lead of the Performance Research Hub; and PI of the ERC project soncities.org.
Liz Rosenfeld (they/them) is a London- and Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist and educator who works with performance, moving image, drawing, and experimental writing practices. Liz addresses the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, and past and future histories in regard to the ways in which memory is queered. Their work deals with flesh as a non-binary collaborative material, specifically focusing on the potentiality of physical abundance and excess, while edging questions regarding the responsibility and privilege of taking up space. Liz’s first book, Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising, co-authored with João Florêncio, was published in 2025 by Rutgers University Press.
TRANS VOICES is the UK’s first professional trans+ vocal collective, blending meditative soundscapes, choral tradition, emerging technology, and bold vocal experimentation to reclaim spaces where trans perspectives are rarely heard. The collective is part of the London Contemporary Voices family. The choir’s co-founders are: Ilā Kamalagharan (ILĀ, she/they), an artist, producer, and vocalist whose practice integrates quantum and AI hybrid techniques, and who is also co-founder and director of leading music institution London Contemporary Voices; and Coda Nicolaeff (she/her), an artist, composer and vocalist whose work explores intersectional identity and collective solidarity.
Rose Wood (she/her) is an American transgender performance artist popularly referred to as the ‘Gender Terrorist’ and ‘The Queen of Filth’. She is notoriously known for her extreme physical acts intentionally created to strike an emotional nerve with audiences. Wood’s work addresses subjects such as variant gender identities, human vulnerability and failings, disempowered individuals, and exposing intimate human struggles that—though usually hidden—remain common to many. She has been the headliner for The Box, an exclusive ‘Theatre of Varieties’ in both New York City (2007) and London (2011) venues for the past 14 years. She frequently performs internationally.
Jacob Kingsbury Downs 