Sv / En

Program

  • Wednesday 20 October
  • 18.00 – 20.00
  • Free
  • English
  • Online

Artist talk: Ayesha Hameed in dialogue with Nina Mangalanayagam

Online on zoom here.
 

With starting point in the work Two Ships presented in the eleventh edition of Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Ayesha Hameed introduces her process and practice.

The programme starts with a lecture performance of “Black Atlantis: Retrograde Futurism” by Ayesha Hameed.

The lecture is followed by a dialogue with Nina Mangalanayagam, artist and professor of photography at HDK Valand Academy at Gothenburg University.

 

The programme is organised by Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art in partnership with Iaspis Konstnärsnämden and Embassy of Canada in Sweden.

Participants

Ayesha Hameed explores the heritage of Black diasporas through the figure of the Atlantic Ocean. 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. Hameed lives and works in London. 

In 2020 Ayesha Hameed has been artist in residence with support from Iaspis Konstnärsnämden. 
The presentation of her work in the biennial is supported by Embassy of Canada in Sweden.  

Nina Mangalanayagam‘s research analyzes the shifting points of identifi­cation she experiences as a mixed-heritage subject to explore the dichotomy of black and white notions of identity. Mangalanayagam is a lecturer at the HDK-Valand Aca­demy in Gothenburg. Recent exhibitions include: Vigilance, Struggle, Pride: Through Her Eyes at Umelka Gallery, Slovak Union of Visual Arts, Bratislava, Slovakia (2019); No Looking Back, Okay? at Umetnostna galerija (UGM), Maribor, Slovenia; Vigilance, Struggle, Pride: Through Her Eyes at the Organ Vida Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia; Sisterhood and Gentle Men at Forum Stadtpark, Graz, Austria; The Tangled Web of Belonging at PhotoEast Festival, Ipswich, UK. 

About Black Atlantis: Retrograde Futurism

On April 29, 2006, a twenty-foot boat was spotted off the south-eastern coast of Barbados. On board, eleven bodies were found by the coastguards, preserved and desiccated by the sun and salt water. The ghost ship was adrift for four months on the Atlantic Ocean. It set sail on Christmas day in Praia in the Cape Verde Islands, full of migrants from Senegal, Guinea Bissau, and Gambia, en route to the Canary Islands. Each of these men paid £890 for their place on the boat. Four months later the boat was found on the coast of Barbados.
This powerpoint cinema performance is an inadequate telling of this story that draws on the materials and tools at hand to make sense of the complicity of weather, ocean currents and state violence in the journey of this ship. Hovering between the film and the essay form is a questioning of the adequacy of the measuring of histories and affects connected to crossing, languages to make evident the materiality of the sea, and the both measurable and immeasurable horror contained in the figure of the ghost ship.