Bonniers Konsthall is pleased to present Radio Brown Atlantis: a radio show in the shape of an exhibition by Ayesha Hameed and guests.
Ayesha Hameed explores the legacies of indentureship and slavery through the figures of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Her Afrofuturist approach combines performance, sound essays, videos, and lectures. 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.
Radio Brown Atlantis is a radio show broadcast on Movement Radio in Athens and Radio alHara in Bethlehem, that invites practitioners in sound art, music and performative thinking. Collectively, they explore the entanglements between Brown and Black people from the African diaspora and South Asia, displaced through enslavement and indenture, and connected through experiences of oceanic colonial routes. Using storytelling, music and poetry, Radio Brown Atlantis reimagines their stories and histories underwater, in an Atlantis at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, and the subaquatic ecologies and life forms surrounding them below.
For the exhibition Radio Brown Atlantis, Ayesha Hameed has collaborated with guests from the first season to recompose each episode as a score, which together combine to fill the space of Bonniers Konsthall, knowing that a Brown Atlantis is cartographically unmappable and that the sonics of a radio show cannot be fully made visible.
A new episode of Radio Brown Atlantis will be recorded with a live audience during the exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall. More information will be announced here soon.
The exhibition also marks the launch of an extended collaboration between Bonniers Konsthall and Ayesha Hameed with the aim of translating Radio Brown Atlantis into a book.
Main image: Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, Planning Sketch (detail), Radio Brown Atlantis
Biography
Ayesha Hameed is based in London, UK. Recent exhibitions include Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2022), Liverpool Biennale (2021), Gothenburg Biennale (2019, 21), Lubumbashi Biennale (2019) and Dakar Biennale (2018). She is co-editor of Futures and Fictions (Repeater 2017) and co-author of Visual Cultures as Time Travel (Sternberg/MIT 2021). She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London and a Kone Foundation Research Fellow in the Arts at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
