Ayesha Hameed is an artist and writer who lives in Montreal. Her video and interactive works look at the relationship between migration, history, incarceration and colonialism. She's written for Public, Fuse Magazine and Topia as well as a few collections of essays like
PLACE: Location and Belonging in New Media Contexts (2007) and is a part of the No One is Illegal Collective in Montreal. She's almost finished her PhD in Social and Political Thought at York University where her dissertation explores the imagery of the sea in the discourse of modernity and the middle passage.
www.ayeshahameed.net
Border Control/Border Movements
> an essay
by Ayesha Hameed and Leila Pourtavaf
Fire, Fences and Flight
> Video Installation
Vernissage: Opening Event October 17, 3pm-7pm @ Yergeau Gallery
Installation: Thursday 18 October to Saturday 20 October from 1pm to 7pm
My video work is part of an ongoing project entitled Virtual Diasporas that explores
histories of the middle passage, immigration, and colonialism. This project attempts
to mobilize the concept of displacement on several fronts: between communities,
between media and between the present and the past. The fissures and displacements
signaled by the technologies of capitalism and (within its logic), of new media, both
place and displace its subjects.
Both my interactive and video work are premised on the idea that virtuality can be
cast historically to reveal the non utopian, or the flip-side of the virtual’s “not-yet”
set of possibilities. In other words, they explore how (post) modernity’s triumphant
dissolution of space and time is inextricable from the ravages of primitive accumulation
and the exploitation of migrant labour. These projects attempt to describe different
manifestations of the colonial unconscious within the modern imaginary.
My academic and media-based work have both looked at the limits (and potentials) of
language in the representation of marginalized bodies and histories. My academic
work looks at how new media works can rethink the notion of the archive in representing
histories of colonialism. These works create alternate narratives that privilege histories
from below, that, like the return of the repressed, are ghostly and surreal, but at the
same time offer material resistances to official accounts.
Leila Pourtavaf is a Montreal based writer, independent curator and activist. She is the co-founder of the BOOKMOBILE project, serves on the board of La Centrale Powerhouse Gallery and is a member of No One Is Illegal Montreal.
