Ayesha Hameed (London, UK) explores the legacies of indentureship and slavery through the figures of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Her Afrofuturist approach combines performance, sound essays, videos, and lectures. Hameed examines the mnemonic power of these media – their capacity to transform the body into a body that remembers. The motifs of water, borders, and displacement, recurrent in her work, offer a reflection on migration stories and materialities, and, more broadly, on the relations between human beings and what they imagine as nature.
Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at Kunstinstituut Melly, Netherlands (2022) and Bonniers Konsthall, Sweden (2022); and group exhibitions at Zeitz MOCCA, South Africa (2022), Liverpool Biennale, UK (2021), Momenta Biennale, Canada (2021), Gothenburg Biennale, Sweden (2019, 2021). She is co-editor of Futures and Fictions (Repeater 2017) and co-author of Visual Cultures as Time Travel (Sternberg/MIT 2021). She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London and a Kone Foundation Research Fellow.
During her residency, Ayesha Hameed will develop a new chapter of her Brown Atlantis radio show (broadcast on Movement Radio in Athens and Radio Alhara in Bethlehem) to look at the French presence in the Indian Ocean world, as well as traces of the Indian Ocean world in France. She plans to follow what might be called the afterlives of indenture and slavery as they are manifest in the colonial metropole both historically and in the present. She will also develop an experimental book based on Radio Brown Atlantis, commissioned by Bonniers Konstall in collaboration with previous guests of the show, that will address several questions: What would be the ways that winds, currents, flora, fauna, time and stars would imprint themselves? How would its language reflect the intonations, creoles and miscommunications at sea? And how we might think of a Brown Atlantis at the bottom of the Indian Ocean without the blinkers of human navigation, and instruments of measurement?