A Transatlantic Periodic Table

Ayesha Hameed’s sound work A Transatlantic Periodic Table takes the raw materials of the transatlantic slave trade as its starting point. We hear the artist telling of her encounters, through museums, archives, abandoned warehouses and the sea itself, with the material traces of the violent extraction of humans and natural resources along the African coast. The artist’s simultaneously factual, corporeal and hauntingly poetic readings of glass, pearl, sugar, gold, bone, and iron found at the bottom of the sea release traces of the materials’ past into the present, where parallels to contemporary migration can be drawn.

From 2019 Gothenburg Biennale Wall Text.

Commissioned by: knowbotiq for Swiss Psychotropic Gold knowbotiq (Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Hübler). Basel: CMV Christoph Merian Verlag. ISBN: 978-3-85616-921-