Ayesha Hameed presents I sing of the sea, I am mermaid of the trees (2021), a newly commissioned multichannel audio and textile installation at Lush Building. Hameed’s installation follows the laying down of the first undersea telegraphic cable between India and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, that was precipitated by the six week delay for Britain to get news of the outbreak of the Revolt of 1857.

Her installation moves this history underwater, taking us to battles against the forces of the seafloor, through the fragile nervousness of cable signals, and to the forests in Sarawak from where gutta percha was extracted to insulate the thousands of miles of undersea cables. I sing of the sea considers how communication can act as a kind of violence, transmitted across the seafloor, consolidating Britain’s imperial control over India. If Imperial Britain was the mother country and its colonies its offspring, then the undersea cable was a kind of pathological, strangulating umbilical cord. This is a subaquatic story of those offspring.

Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial with support from Canada Council for the Arts and The High Commission of Canada in the United Kingdom. Sound design with Will Saunders.

The 11th edition of Liverpool Biennial was scheduled to take place in 2020 but was postponed due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Now rescheduled to 2021 (6 March –20 June 2021), the programme will be delivered as originally conceived but responsive to the new context – curated by Manuela Moscoso, with the artist list announced in November 2019.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/27844