Ayesha Hameed and Hamedine Kane: In the Shadow of Our Ghosts
Ayesha Hameed and Hamedine Kane, In the Shadow of Our Ghosts, 2018.
HD video, colour, sound, 13 min 34 sec. Courtesy the artist and Selebe Yoon, Dakar
About the work
On 29 April 2006, a 20-foot boat was spotted off the south-eastern coast of Barbados. On board, coastguards found 11 bodies, preserved and sun-dried. The ghost ship had been drifting for four months in the Atlantic Ocean. The film presents an inadequate narrative of a story that relies on media sources to evoke the complicity of the weather, ocean currents and state violence in the boat’s journey. The glide between film and forms tests the measurement of tragedies related to crossings and immigration, the power of the sea and the abiding horror of the symbol of the ghost ship.
About the artist
Hamedine Kane (b. 1983, Nouakchott, Mauritania) is a Senegalese-Mauritanian artist and director who lives and works between Brussels, Paris and Dakar. Trained as a librarian, he studied the book trade in Nouakchott, Dakar, and Paris before moving to Brussels. His artistic practice explores themes of migration and borders, using film, photography, performance and installation. In his work, Kane sees borders not as symbols, limits,or factors of impossibility, but as places of passage and transformation. Co-founder of ‘The School of Mutants’, he focuses on the transmission of post-colonial knowledge and questions the states of migration.
Ayesha Hameed (London, UK) 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. She currently teaches on the MFA in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, is a Kone Foundation research fellow, artist in residence at the Camden Arts Centre and professor of artistic research at Uniarts Helsinki.
About ICA x FRIEZE FILM LONDON
Frieze Film returns to Frieze London in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The curated selection of seven films will be screened throughout Frieze Week, 8–13 October, at the ICA and on frieze.com, streaming online until 31 October.
The programme showcases films from galleries with a focus on early-career and under-exposed artists. This year’s films were selected by a jury including Steven Cairns (Head of Artistic Programme at the ICA), Myriam Mouflih (Curator, Writer and Programmer at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival) and Guilherme Blanc (Artistic Director of Batalha Centro de Cinema and curator of independent cinema and moving image) for the second year.
