Sadia Pineda Hameed

(MISUNDERSTANDING)

(ACCOMODATION)

(PERFORMANCE)

(LOSS)

Artist Sadia Pineda Hameed presents four billboard artworks as part of her commission, featuring interconnected conversations that bring together moments of recognition and rupture between languages, cultures and generations. An experiment in hybridisation as a strategy for home-making, the artist presents four iterations of a hybrid language, by writing Tagalog phrases phonetically in Urdu script. This play between languages is activated anew with each reader, creating moments of slippage and familiarity, a space for connection and learning.

Two iterations of the work simultaneously dislocate and conjoin two vital sites for the artist: the Señora de Gracia Church in Makati, Manila, based at the top of the hill where her mother grew up; and the Lahore Fort in Pakistan, which was the logo of her father’s restaurant Lahore Kebab House of East London, Kingsbury from 1992-2010.

The buses, which are combined together in two of the works, find further points of intercultural connection between the Pakistani ‘jingle truck’ and a Filipino ‘jeepney’. Both remained in the respective countries following British and American military operations, and are now decorated as a distinct artfrom, and used for public transport. The buses are hybrid spaces, connected through generations and separation, that adapt, mask, perform, hide and rewrite parts of themselves and their histories.

Invoking the potentiality of misunderstanding, the feeling of home amongst loss, the power of enactment and the relinquishing of the desire to know, these works playfully unravel beyond the grasps of singularity.

Thanks to artists/friends Beau W Beakhouse, Okui Lala, Alfred Marasigan, Nora Selmani, Deborah Fecadu, Jasmine Hanciles and Sura Fawzi for the conversations.

Made possible with the support of BuildHollywood, part of the JackArts family. In partnership with Studio Voltaire.

DATES AND LOCATIONS:
8 – 11 July: Walm Lane/26 St Pauls Ave, Willesden Green, NW2 4QU, Brent
11 – 17 July: 14 Dudden Hill Lane, Willesden Green, NW10 2ET, Brent
18 – 24 July: 167 Clapham High Street/Gauden Road, SW4 7XA
25 – 31 July: 125 Clapham High Street, SW4 7SS

Sadia Pineda Hameed is an artist based in Cardiff, Wales. She works in film, installation, text and performance to explore collective and inherited trauma; in particular, the latent ways we speak about this through dreaming, telepathic communion and secrets as an anticolonial strategy inherent to us. Her practice is led by semiotic and associative journeying, the revivification of archives, and a trust in the intuitive process. She has a collaborative practice with Beau W Beakhouse, which dramatises, reconstructs and reenacts autonomous and alternate futures.

Instagram: @sadiaph

Website: www.sadiaph.com

Sadia Pineda Hameed‘s billboards were commissioned as part of the Brent Biennial 2022, titled ‘In the House of my Love’. The second edition of the Biennial asked how, and why, the act of making home can be a form of resistance and survival within the context of hostile environments—including those of racism, homophobia, ableism, climate catastrophe and political austerity. The Brent Biennial 2022 was curated by Eliel Jones, in collaboration with a curatorial committee comprised of artists Adam Farah, Abbas Zahedi and Jamila Prowse. Find out more by visiting the Archive.