Ayesha Hameed (London, Helsinki) makes videos, sound works, textiles, and performances. She is also a creative writer, critical essayist and poet. She has appeared on the BBC on several occasions as an artist and thinker. Hameed’s work explores the legacies of indentureship and slavery through the figures of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Her speculative approach examines the mnemonic power of the media she uses and intermixes: 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 commissions include solo exhibitions at Bonniers Konsthall (2022) Kunstinstituut Melly (2022), Indigo Waves at Zeitz MOCCA (2022), as well as contributions to the Liverpool Biennale (2021), Gothenburg Biennales (2019 and 2021), Momenta Biennale (2021), Lubumbashi Biennale (2019) and Dakar Biennale (2018). She is co-editor of Futures and Fictions (Repeater 2017) and co-author of Visual Cultures as Time Travel (Sternberg/MIT 2021).She currently teaches on the MFA in Art at Goldsmiths University of London, is a Kone Foundation Research Fellow, was Artist in Residence at the Camden Arts Centre and is Professor of Artistic Research at Uniarts Helsinki.
A poetics of testimony and witness
This workshop will consider the relationship between poetry, community, war and speculative futures. We will explore collectively the role and limits of language in the context of genocide, the ways in which language’s own limits can become part of a poetic practice, and how the silences at the limit of language can become sites of speculation and witness. This will be a collective reading and writing session premised on acts of sharing and community.