Teaching

Classes:

• 20 week Year 1 BA Module Space and Time (100 students, co-taught)
• 20 week Year 1 BA Core Course Introduction to Art History (Convenor,150 students, co-taught)
• 20 week Year 3 BA module Landscape and Power (20 students)
• 20 week Year 3 BA module Sites of Memory (20 students)
• 20 week BA all years module Link Seminar (150 students, co-taught)
• 15 week MA module The Ocean as Archive (15 students)
• 15 week MA module Conflict and Resolution (Centre for Research Architecture, co-taught)
• 20 week PhD Research Architecture Seminar (20 students, co-taught)
• 20 week PhD Research Methods Seminar (20 students)

Course Director/Programme Leader:

• Co-Director BA Fine Art and History of Art (5 years)
• Director MA Contemporary Art History (1 year)
• Co-Director MA Research Architecture (1 year)
• Co-Director PhD in Visual Cultures (ongoing; currently on research leave)

• 20 week Year 1 BA Module Introduction to Fibres (20 students)

• 20 week BA Year 2 module Film, Television and Society, Dept of Film and Video (Marker 200 students)
• 20 week BA Year 2 module Worlds of Ancient Greece and Rome Dept of Humanities (Teaching Assistant 25 students)
• 20 week BA Year 3 module The Networked Imagination Dept of Humanities (Teaching Assistant 25 students)
• 20 week BA Year 4 module Women, Violence and Social Policy Dept of Sociology (Teaching Assistant 25 students)
• 20 week BA Year 3 module Sociology of the Family Dept. of Sociology (Teaching Assistant 25 students)

• Chair, Master Symposium, Fine Arts Department HEAD Geneva (2021)
• Visiting Lecturer at MA Work Master HEAD Geneva (2020-21)
• External Examiner in Moving Image Brighton University  (2016-19)
• Visiting Faculty at the Raw Material Company in Dakar (2017)
• Domain Referent for the Dutch Art Institute’s periodic revalidation by the Graduate School of ArtEZ (2019)
• President of the CCC Head’s jury de diplôme in Geneva (2018, 2019) (declined)
• External Reviewer for the Programme Re-validation of the MA in Asian Art Histories, LASALLE Singapore (2014)
• Guest Lecturer PhD in Practice Art Academy of Vienna
• Guest Lecturer Postgraduate programme at Dutch Art Institute
• Guest Lecturer Postgraduate programme at BAK
• Guest Lecturer Knight Foundation Art + Research Center, ICA Miami

PhD

• Camilla Rocha de Campos PhD Department of Visual Cultures (2022-)
• Sehr Jalil (Co-supervision with Adnan Madani) (2021-)
• Sophia Loiziou (Co-supervisor with Department of Music) (2019-)
• Rachael Finney PhD Department of Visual Cultures (2017-) Viva set May 2023
• Ifor Duncan (Co-Supervisor with Centre for Research Architecture) PhD (2014-19) Completed
• Richard Hylton PhD Department of Visual Cultures (2013-18 ) Completed

As External Examiner

• Onyeka Igwe PhD London College of Communication, UAL. Supervisors Prof. William Raban, Dr Pratap Rughani (Summer 2020)
• Dele Ademayo PhD Upgrade Centre for Research Architecture (2020)
• Marlo de Lara PhD University of Leeds Supervisor Griselda Pollock (2019)
• Sam Dolbear Birkbeck Supervisor Professor Esther Leslie (2018)
• Roopesh Sitharan Supervisor Dr Jean Paul Martinon (2017)
• Macon Holt Goldsmiths University of London Supervisor Dr Mark Fisher (2017)
• External Examiner BA Moving Image University of Brighton (2016-19)
• Philippe Zourgane PhD upgrade, Centre for Research Architecture (2012)

MA

• I have supervised over 100 BA and MA students at Goldsmiths and in guest lectureships elsewhere. List available upon request.

The Ocean as Archive explores several interdisciplinary approaches to reading the water.  It starts by examining discourses on the ‘watery anthropocene’. Spurred by this crisis it considers other ways of reading the water: materially through oceanographic studies of watery depths and strata, and marine life therein; and temporally by considering the ocean as a speculative site, and as a space of residues. This module also explores alternate ways of reading this crisis: through non-western (Pacific Island) maritime epistemologies and myths, through discourses on migration (both contemporary and historical), through the mobilisation of the image of water in critical theory, in literature, in music and in art.

The class examines the site of the ocean not with the aim to systematically plumb its depths so to speak, but rather sees the ocean as a laboratory with which to examine multiple and often contradictory approaches when taking to the sea. As a result a key summative assignment is a creative journal, which is intended as a site to explore critical experimental approaches to interdisciplinary ways of knowing, which the crisis of the watery anthropocene urgently demands.

The Ocean as Archive considers methods with which we can begin to understand what is at stake in articulating the visual cultures of the sea. These methods are practice-led, and are aimed at students interested in exploring experimental methods in their critical work.

The aim is … to change “landscape” from a noun to a verb.  It asks that we think of landscape, not as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed. – WJT Mitchell

This 2 part module investigates how landscape forms what WJT Mitchell calls a process or a site of action that catalyses the social and political to unfold. From this perspective landscape is used in this course to take stock of the image and representation of four interconnected terrains: land, sea, air and outer space.  Landscape and Power considers what landscape as a process could possibly mean in the face of climate change, drone attacks, remote satellite imaging, forced migrations and rapid industrial expansion, and asks how that process is mobilized in both still and moving images, and in literature. This module draws on both historical and contemporary sites to consider methods of narrating the landscape when the optics of what constitutes the landscape are rapidly changing. Boundaries between human impact and nature are increasingly eroded as are the boundaries between land and sea, future and past. This destabilizes the relationship between figure and ground so central to the discourse on landscape, as it provides other possible relationships between the human and landscape that erodes the distinctions between them, challenges whether the human or the terrain is the figure, and whether the landscape can continue to take on the role of the ground.  Consequently notions of subjectivity, interiority and forms of memory are central themes that permeate this module.

To this end, in the Autumn Term Part 1 Between Land and Sea is divided into 2 five-week sessions.  The first five weeks consider methods of narrating such shifting terrains: from the narrative convergence of space and time in the chronotope, to the dérive or drift, to ethnographic writing.  The second half of the module turns to the sea – considering liminal spaces like the beach as well as different narrative approaches to migration – from the transportation of slaves across the Atlantic in the 18th century to contemporary illegalized migrations across the Mediterranean.  Through reading texts by Dipesh Chakrabarty, MM Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Paul Gilroy, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, TJ Demos and viewing works by Juan Downey, Trinh T Minh-Ha, Edward Burtynsky, Isaac Julien, CAMP and Anja Kirschner and David Panos this module asks: what are the ways in which landscape speaks to us and tells us stories embedded in it?

In the Spring Term Part 2 From Sky to Stars considers how the representation of the sky and outer space as a landscape forms a projective fantasy.  This fantasy is twofold, projecting into the future and imagining technical utopias on the one hand, whilst simultaneously seeing these distant spaces as cautionary tales.  This is the stuff of science fiction which is explored in the first five weeks as a method and involves looking at (anti-)capitalist and afro-futurisms. It also involves considering a shift in the quality of the gaze from narration (in Part 1 of this module), to an upward turning, more scientific gaze of observation.  The second half of the course turns to ineffables and the ephemera of the air as a site, examining satellite mapping, sonics and dust particles.

Key texts in this term include work by Walter Benjamin, Lorraine Daston, Ursula K Leguin, Marc Augé, Octavia Butler, Gilles Deleuze and works by Trevor Paglen, Harun Farocki, Chris Marker, Patricio Guzman, RAQS Media, Drexciya, Sun Ra and the Wilson Sisters.

(Co-Taught in 4 blocks)

This module considers how modern and contemporary visual practices incorporate questions of space and time and how, in this context, uses of different media spatialize and temporalize cultural experiences and social meanings. A particular focus will be on the ways in which many artworks produce unconventional experiences of space and time that present interpretive challenges and provoke critical questions. Art historical dependencies on the chronological will also be interrogated and explored. Throughout the module, lectures and seminars will consider this wide variety of visual practices and the space and time in which they are produced and encountered so as to examine their cultural, social, and political horizons. On this basis, the module also examines the ways in which an engagement with space and time potentially reconfigures the relation of aesthetic practice to the expanded social field.

The module is divided into 4 blocks: ‘Picturing Space and Time’, ‘Remembering Space and Time’, ‘Experiencing Space and Time’ and ‘Imagining Space and Time’. Through these blocks of study students will develop skills in thinking about the temporality and spatiality of different media (for instance, installation, still and moving images, sculpture or other two- and three- dimensional forms) and the issues that inform artworks that make use of these media.

Independent visits to galleries and exhibitions will be noted during each block of study and you are encouraged to incorporate consideration of these into your presentations and essays.

BLOCK IV: IMAGINING SPACE & TIME

Lecturer: Dr Ayesha Hameed
In this block we consider how space and time is experienced as a contrast between internal (psychic) worlds and external landscapes. We look outside, at the strangeness of different terrains of the city and countryside, and how images of them are temporalized and visualized as from the past or the future. In other words, rather than its familiarity, we look at these sites as spaces of continual change in and through which the past and future is projected. Fantasy is explored as an imaginative response to war, modernity, colonialism, resistance and industrial expansion. We move in scale starting with the individual, then move to the city, to tourism and war, finally ending with the countryside and outer space.

Week 16: Fantasy as Dreamwork
Through movements such as Dada, Surrealism and later techniques such as William Burroughs’ ‘Cut Up’ method, we consider how notions of the unconscious and dreams were used to make sense of the modern world through evoking both primordial and the futuristic images. These explorations mobilized both images of the past and possibilities of the future in order to show both the creative and destructive elements of modern life.

Week 17: Fantasies of the City
This week considers how rapid changes in the spatial structure of the city produced new ways of experiencing and imagining time. The city as the site of the most rapid changes is explored as a source of imagery of possible futures as well as a way of taking stock of the breakdown of old ways of life. This is considered in light of physical changes made to the city such as the creation of boulevards and the introduction of street lights: urban spaces that changed so quickly and continuously that it was impossible to create a definitive image of it.

Week 18: Fantasies of Home, Fantasies of Travel
Travel and advertising are considered together as fantasies of another place coded onto another time. In other words, the notion of escapism is explored as a fantasy to contrast with the restriction of being confined in a single space. This week considers various fantasies of travel: from gendered fantasies of escaping the home, to the promise of advertising that creates images of escape to other places of freedom either in the idyllic past or exciting future.

Week 19: Fantasies of War
This week considers how the imaginary takes stock of the destruction of the landscape and the loss of life that accompanies the experience of war. It considers issues like the space-time compressions that go with shell shock, to notions of the war hero. It also considers fantasies of a nation at war that calls attention to the glory of war and the bravery of soldiers, as well as ways in which war is represented visually – what is remembered, what is forgotten and what is erased. From the projected histories that justify a nation at war to futuristic images of war technologies, to the ideal soldier as fighting machine, war is fuelled by a temporal and spatial fantasy.

Week 20: Outer Spaces and Other Times
In this final week we consider how the landscape is imagined both futuristically and anachronistically. We consider depictions of diverse landscapes such as the countryside as well as more fantastical spaces like images of outer space. We consider how the image of the countryside has been changed through fears of climate change and the destruction of the landscape, as well as how it is represented in genres like horror and science fiction.