Ayesha Hameed

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), and Indigo Waves at Zeitz MOCCA (2022), as well as contributions to the Liverpool Biennale (2021). She is co-editor of Futures and Fictions (Repeater, 2017) and co-author of Visual Cultures as Time Travel (Sternberg/MIT, 2021). She was Artist in Residence at the Camden Arts Centre and currently teaches in the MFA in Art program at Goldsmiths University of London, is a Kone Foundation Research Fellow, and is Professor of Artistic Research at Uniarts Helsinki.