Ayesha Hameed
Directing
Biography
Through videos, audio essays and performance lectures, Ayesha Hameed examines how to think through sound, image, water, violence and history as elements of an active archive; and time travel as an historical method. Recent exhibitions include Liverpool Biennale (2020), Gothenburg Biennale (2019), 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 forthcoming 2020). She is currently Co-Programme Leader of the PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London.
Known For
Most stories end with the crime, but sometimes the crime scene represents just the tip of the iceberg. From a murder scene that tipped police off to a polygamist secret society to a random house fire that revealed family secrets that had been buried for decades, Pandora's Box: Unleashing Evil uncovers gripping investigations that get more sordid as every piece of evidence is examined.
Pandora's Box: Unleashing Evil
After being cheated out of her dream job, a long-suffering receptionist plots revenge.
Gladys Brown
On 29 April 2006, a twenty-foot boat was spotted off the south-eastern coast of Barbados. On board, eleven bodies were found by coastguards, preserved and sun-dried. The ghost ship had been drifting for four months on the Atlantic Ocean. The film presents an inadequate narrative of a story that relies on media sources to evoke the complicity of the weather, ocean currents, and state violence in the ship’s journey. The glide between film and forms tests the measurement of tragedies related to crossings and immigration, highlighting the power of the sea and the horror of the figure of the ghost ship.
In the Shadow of Our Ghosts
Black Atlantis is a multi-part, live audio-visual essay that looks at possible afterlives of the Black Atlantic: in contemporary illegalized migration at sea, in oceanic environments, through Afrofuturistic dancefloors and soundsystems, and in outer space.
Black Atlantis: the Plantationocene
We were huddled in front of the thin light of a fire in an abandoned house on a cold January night in Calais. X was making another cup of very sugary tea. Y, stirring the kindling, yelled as he accidentally grabbed a burning twig. “are you trying to clean your fingerprints?” laughed X. ‘A Rough History’ is a performance lecture, installation and 16mm film following several visits to Calais, that considers a practice by migrants entering the EU of destroying their fingerprints to avoid detection by the Eurodac system, alongside other histories of fingerprinting and fingerprint erasures. It sees the fingerprint as a scaled down landscape, looking at the circulation of the image of the fingerprint, and the different lives and journeys of the migrants whose hands produce such images.