Liquid Club #15: Ayesha Hameed
As part of Liverpool Biennial 2021, Ayesha Hameed will present a newly commissioned audio-visual installation, with support from Canada Council for the Arts and The High Commission of Canada in the UK, that charts the placement of the first undersea telegraphic cable between India and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ahead of the unveiling of this new project later in the Spring, we invite Ayesha to share examples of her multi-layered work through deep listening and conversation.
In this one-off event join Ayesha in conversation with MIT Professor of Anthropology, Stefan Helmreich, and Liverpool Biennial Curator, Manuela Moscoso, for an in-depth look at her research-based practice that explores contemporary borders, migration and critical race theory.
About the Artist
Ayesha Hameed lives in London, UK. Since 2013, Hameed’s multi-chapter project 'Black Atlantis' has looked at the Black Atlantic and its afterlives in contemporary illegalised migration at sea, oceanic environments, outer space and through Afrofuturistic dancefloors and sound systems. Through videos, audio-essays and performance-lectures, she examines how to think through sound, image, water, violence and history as elements of an active archive; and travelling back in time as a historical method. She is currently co-programme leader of the PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London.
About the Guest Speakers
Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at MIT. His research examines how biologists think through the limits of "life" as a category of analysis. His books include Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009), a study of marine biologists working in realms usually out of sight and reach: the microscopic world, the deep sea, and oceans outside national sovereignty., and most recently Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2016) which questions the changing definitions of life, water, and sound (and features a soundtrack).
