25 days ago
24
3
Posted On: June 30th 2026, 07:38 pm
A packed house at @ic_visual_lab for a truly inspiring @sadiaph (Sadia Pineda Hameed) presentation that explored fascinating camcorder footage of her mother’s dance troupe performing (a family archive that was occasionally accidentally taped over with news items relating to the Philippines in the 80s, the opening sequence of “Dallas” or Rolling Stones in concert).
Through Hameed’s spoken script and her montage of the videos, she offered up ways to think about the dancing body materialising layers of knotty histories and emotional geographies: gestures, costumes, rhythms and instruments articulating in direct and more oblique ways memories and counter/memories of long histories of indigeneity, successive colonisations and imaginative island solidarities.
Cover song performers also feature in the videos and they were explored in terms of haunted karaoke, where a spirited version of Rockwell’s “Knife,” for example, becomes a potent and heartfelt meditation on loss and loneliness but also belonging and becoming and liberation. I don’t want to make it sound even the slightest bit dry - it was the very opposite of that, a powerful demonstration that deep, thoughtful art can be utterly engaging. The Q&A was in full swing when I had to run for my train.
Through Hameed’s spoken script and her montage of the videos, she offered up ways to think about the dancing body materialising layers of knotty histories and emotional geographies: gestures, costumes, rhythms and instruments articulating in direct and more oblique ways memories and counter/memories of long histories of indigeneity, successive colonisations and imaginative island solidarities.
Cover song performers also feature in the videos and they were explored in terms of haunted karaoke, where a spirited version of Rockwell’s “Knife,” for example, becomes a potent and heartfelt meditation on loss and loneliness but also belonging and becoming and liberation. I don’t want to make it sound even the slightest bit dry - it was the very opposite of that, a powerful demonstration that deep, thoughtful art can be utterly engaging. The Q&A was in full swing when I had to run for my train.
Comments (3)
24 days agosadiaph
angus! i didn’t realise you were there! sorry we didn’t get a chance to meet irl properly, thank you so much for your kind words :)
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