Of Sea Changes and Other Futurisms | Ayesha Hameed

Of Sea Changes and Other Futurisms explores two long term projects. The first, Black Atlantis, is a speculative exploration of the relationship between the transatlantic slave trade, contemporary illegalised migration, and the watery environment of the ocean below. The second, Brown Atlantis, is a new project which extends the speculative methodology produced for Black Atlantis to look at the ecologies of the Indian Ocean world with histories of indenture and slavery.

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), Lubumbashi Biennale, DRC (2019) and Dakar Biennale, Senegal (2018). She recently co-directed the residency The Weapon of Theory as a Conference of Birds at the Banff Centre for the Arts (2022) and was an Art Explora Resident at Cite des Arts Paris (2023). 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.