Ayesha Hameed is an interdisciplinary artist based in London who works across film, sound, textiles, performance and poetry.
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.
Her recent works have moved closer to her own South Asian heritage exploring more closely the Indian Ocean and its surrounding lands and botanies as sites which witnesses thresholds between life, death, human and non-human and for her its relation to women, care and intergeneration grief.
Hameed will use the residency as an opportunity to develop a new body of research experimenting with and taking time to understand two new strands of her practice that she has recently started working with – poetry and experimental film making processes.
With a practice that has inherently imbued language throughout, she now wants to focus on its form on the page – the importance of its detail, lineation, punctuation – and how this might extend beyond it.
Image: Ayesha Hameed and Tom Hirst, We are in Flood (2024), Performance still from Elvin Brandhi – Three-Day-residency at Cafe Oto. Image courtesy the Artists. Photo: Stephen Shiell