Performance: Ayesha Hameed and Tom Hirst

Artist Ayesha Hameed and musician Tom Hirst perform their new work We are in flood (2024), exploring subaquatic bodies of water as sites of grief, suffering and kinship. Through these water ecosystems and adjacent worlds, the piece weaves together echoes of voices from past works Black Atlantis: The End of Eating Everything and Brown Atlantis Radio as Hameed and Hirst continue their explorations of the Atlantic and Indian oceans and the imagined Kumari Kandam, a lost Tamil continent that was the cradle of all human civilisation. An Atlantis before Atlantis.

This piece includes music from Bi Kidude, Rabindranath Tagore, Pearl Divers from the Arabian Peninsula and the voices of Rachel Baker, Lizzie Homersham, Bijan Moosavi, Christian Nyampeta and Theodor Ringborg

Ayesha Hameed is Camden Art Centre’s Studio Residency artist for 2024/25. She is an interdisciplinary artist based in London who works across film, sound, textiles, performance and poetry. Her work explores legacies of indentureship and slavery through the figures of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Recent commissions including solo and group exhibitions at Bonniers Konsthall (2022) Kunstinstituut Melly (2022), Indigo Waves and Other Stories at Zeitz MOCCA (2022), as well as contributions to the Liverpool Biennale (2021), Gothenburg Biennales (2019 and 2021), Momenta Biennale (2021), Lubumbashi Biennale (2019) and Dakar Biennale (2018). Recent performances have been at Cafe Oto (2024), Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Madrid (2023), Akademie der Künste der Welt , Cologne (2019) SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2019) and Camden Art Centre (2017)
Hameed is co-editor of Futures and Fictions (Repeater 2017) and co-author of Visual Cultures as Time Travel (Sternberg/MIT 2021) and is currently working on two new publications; her series of audio essays Black Atlantis with Strange Attractor Press and the radio series Brown Atlantis Radio with Centre for Art Reasearch and Alliances (CARA) in New York.

Tom Hirst is a London-based musician working out of his studio in Woolwich. His music takes inspiration from hauntological pop, heavy guitar music, computer generated and modular synth-based generative music and science fiction soundtracks. Since the early 90’s he has been producing, collaborating and playing in bands in the UK and abroad. Performing and recording under his aliases Design a Wave and American Sound, his chameleon-like style has seen his music released by a variety of record labels including Alien Jams, Alter, Subsubtropics and Rush hour's no label. He plays guitar in Alice Band and writes and performs with Freya Barlow as synth pop duo Sugar Daddy. Past projects have seen him working with artists including Alice Theobald, Lizzie Homersham and Ayesha Hameed.

Host or Publisher Camden Art Centre