'Sediments and Arrhythmias: race, sense and sensation' Seminar: Ayesha Hameed - Black Atlantis

This seminar is the first in the 'Sediments and Arrhythmias' series taking place at the Institute of Advanced Studies in 2016/2017.  Black Atlantis is a live audio-visual essay that looks at possible afterlives of the Black Atlantic: in contemporary illegalized migration at sea, in oceanic environments, through Afrofuturistic dancefloors and soundsystems, and in outer space.

Black Atlantis combines two conversations - afrofuturism and the anthropocene. It takes as point of departure Drexciya, the late 20th century electronic music duo from Detroit, and their creation of a sonic, fictional world. Through liner notes and track titles, Drexciya take the Black Atlantic below the water with their imaginary of an Atlantis comprised of former slaves who have adapted to living underwater.

Ayesha Hameed's work explores contemporary borders and migration, critical race theory, Walter Benjamin, and visual cultures of the Black Atlantic.  Her work has been performed or exhibited at ICA London (2015), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2014), at The Chimurenga Library at the Showroom, London (2015), Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities, Oxford (2015), Edinburgh College of Art (2015), Kunstraum Niederoesterreich Vienna (2015), Pavillion, Leeds in 2015 and at Homeworks Space Program, Beirut in 2016.

Her publications include contributions to Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg Press 2014), We Travelled The Spaceways (Duke University Press forthcoming 2017), Unsound/Undead (Univocal, Forthcoming 2017); and books including Visual Cultures as Time Travel (with Henriette Gunkel Sternberg, forthcoming 2017), Futures and Fictions (co-edited with Simon O'Sullivan and Henriette Gunkel, forthcoming 2017). She is currently the Joint Programme Leader in Fine Art and History of Art and formerly a Research Fellow with Forensic Architecture at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University, London.

Image: Drexciya, Grava 4 (Clone, 2002)

If you would like to contribute or require more information please contact Dhanveer Brar / Junior Research Fellow / IAS (d.brar@ucl.ac.uk)

'Sediments and Arrhythmias' Seminar Series

Within the current conjuncture of global capitalism, how are "blackness", "brownness" and racial otherness more broadly, produced, disseminated and received across sonic, visual and textual media? How has "race" as a system of analysis been reconfigured to adequately provide a grammar for these changes? In what ways are modalities of racial otherness understood as experiential categories, cultural aesthetics, intellectual practices or sites of politics in the early twenty-first century?

The 'Sediments and Arrhythmias: race, sense, sensation seminar series at the Institute of Advanced Studies will address questions of racial difference, aesthetic mediation, haptical experience and critical reflection as they shape the spheres of intellectual, cultural and artistic production by Black and Non-black people of colour in the Global North. Using the epistemologically unstable yet highly productive intersections of optics, text, sound, thought, gesture and more, the aim of "Sediments and Arrhythmias" is to speculate on the ontologies of racial otherness as they animate and disrupt many of the affective, fleshy, social and political experiences of the world. The seminar series will be built around presentations and conversations with thinkers and artists who share a common interest in mapping out the sensory valences of racial capitalism in its current form.

Future Dates: 14 December / 25 January / 1 March / 22 March / 26 April / 24 May / 28 June (all dates listed fall on Wednesdays)

Time: 5pm - 7pm

Location: Institute of Advanced Studies, Seminar Room 11, First Floor, South Wing

Full list of speakers to be confirmed shortly

If you would like to contribute or require more information please contact Dhanveer Brar / Junior Research Fellow / IAS (d.brar@ucl.ac.uk)

Image: Sondra Perry, "Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One" (2015)