sadiaph@gmail.com
@sadiaph

b. 1995, London
based in the Ebbw Valley, Wales

Sadia Pineda Hameed is a Filipina Pakistani artist and writer whose work explores latent ways to speak about collective and intergenerational trauma through inherent anticolonial strategies of dreaming, telepathic communion and secrets. Using film, installation, text and performance, her work further imagines what future tools for resistance, value and communication springing from these strategies might look like.

Her practice is led by a process of cross-disciplinary semiotic and associative journeying in resistance to western processes of historicisation and displacement. Mythmaking, melodrama, decoy, unearthing and hiding become playful devices to immerse viewers in a ‘delirious discourse’ where personal archives and collective experiences converge.

She also also runs print, radio and curatorial project LUMIN.

AWARDS

Arts Council Wales Perspectives Fellowship 2024
Pushcart Prize Nominee 2023
British School at Rome Fellowship 2023
g39 Freelands Fellowship 2022-24
Arts Foundation Futures Award for Visual Artists longlist 2022
Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Artists 2021
Literature Wales New Writers Award 2020
Rising Star Wales Writers Award 2020

SOLO EXHIBITION


2025
Forthcoming, Llantarnam Grange, Cwmbran

2024
Forthcoming, The Big Pit Mining Museum, National Museum Wales, Blaenavon

2023
Ornaments of Prospect, Catalyst Arts, Belfast

2022
Billboards, Brent Biennial 2022, In the House of my Love, Metroland Cultures, Build Hollywood and Studio Voltaire, London

2021
it resonates like spalting wood, Arcade/Campfa, Cardiff

2020
The Song of My Life, Bluecoat, Liverpool

Local 37, MOSTYN, Llandudno

2019
Tiny Bubbles in the Wine, HOAX, online

GROUP EXHIBITION


2024
HERE, NOW, Bay Arts, Cardiff

Here, at the edge, today, g39, Cardiff

Betwixt: Beneath, the Crypt Gallery, London

SMALL V01CE, Honor Fraser, Los Angeles

2023
Can publications be porous?, Stuart Hall Library, Iniva, London

British School at Rome Open Studios, Rome

2022
Open Milpa Lab: Living Room, Centrum Kultury ZAMEK, Poznan

Thinking Green, Glynn Vivian, Swansea

I Watched in Amazement, curated by HOAX, The Mosaic Rooms, London

2021
The Mobile Feminist Library: In Words, In Action, In Connection, MOSTYN, Llandudno

Jerwood UNITe open studios, g39, Cardiff

2020

(un)seen (un)heard, National Museum Cardiff

2019
Made in Roath Open, g39, Cardiff

A New Mecca, The Temple of Peace, Gentle/Radical, Cardiff

2018
Analogue, Three Doors Up, Cardiff

RESIDENCIES


2023
British School at Rome, Rome

2022
Centrum Kultury ZAMEK residency, Poznan

Casgleb, Peak Cymru, Abergavenny

2021
Unidee, Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella

Co-Tangent, Tangent Projects, Barcelona

Jerwood UNITe, g39, Cardiff

Catalyst Arts Spring online residency, Belfast

2020

Hinterlands, Peak Cymru

Hunan-Iaith, Ty Newydd National Writing Centre for Wales, Criccieth

2019
WARP Library residency, g39, Cardiff

New Writers Award residency, Ty Newydd National Writing Centre for Wales, Criccieth

Curatorial residency, SHIFT, Cardiff


PERFORMANCE


2022
Link Rot, Jerwood Staging Series, Jerwood Arts

2021
Borrow Tomorrow, The Mosaic Rooms, London

PAMPHLET BOMB, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff

speculation, Jerwood UNITe open studios, g39, Cardiff

2020

return etc, Digithon Festival, arts headliner, Wales Arts Review

2019

featured poet, Where I’m Coming From, g39, Cardiff

Bearing Witness to Truth, National Museum Cardiff and Artes Mundi, Cardiff

2018
The Crypt, Gentle/Radical’s A New Mecca, The Temple of Peace, Cardiff

Decolonising Heritage with Gentle/Radical, Bay Arts, Cardiff, commissioned by the Eisteddfod & the National Trust

featured poet, Porridge, Theatre Deli, London

featured poet, Women & War: An Un-silencing, The Open University and Festival of Voice, Cardiff

PUBLICATION


2023
Poetry Wales 59.1 Summer 2023

Interview, British School at Rome

2022
HON: Women Artists in Wales, H’mm Arts Foundation Press

UTYPIA, Oriel Davies Gallery

2021

Merched yn Gwneud Celf zine, Eisteddfod

Poetry Wales 57.1 Summer 2021

DOUBLE, Takeaway #9

Imagining Internationally Connected Practice (consulting artist), Arts Council Wales

2020

Undefining the Artist, Wales Arts Review

Dismantling Structural Inequality in Your Cinema, BFI

LOVE Magazine, Love Diaries vol. 1

Evening, ZARF #14

2019
Tortang Tolang, Porridge Magazine: Comfort Foods

Site Ruin, Amberflora Issue 6

Interview, Wide Vicinity

2018
Save Our Sculpture, Wales Arts Review

For you, after a film, Porridge Magazine Issue 1

To (Un)speak Madness re: Derrida, Foucault, Artaud, LUMIN Journal 1

TALKS


2023
CASTRO Projects, Rome

visiting artist, Arts Council Wales’ Cynefin

visiting artist, Oriel Myrddin

2022

visiting artist, Cardiff Metropolitan - Fine Arts BA

visiting artist, Oxford University - Fine Arts MA

2021
HerStories / Shelf Life, Iniva

Home and Away, Gallery Simpson, Swansea

Dismantling Structural Inequality In Your Cinema, Glasgow Film Festival (2021), This Way Up Festival (2020)

guest, Boxoffice podcast

2020
Women in Publishing Symposium panelist, Bangor University

2019
guest critic, Arts Review Show, BBC Radio Wales

Dis/establishing the Archive, Archiving Gender symposium paper presentation, Cardiff University

2018
Decolonising the Starving Artist, Gentle/Radical’s Imagination Forum #4, symposium at Sustainable Studios, Cardiff

 

BRENT BIENNIAL BILLBOARDS


2022. public art, four billboards

(misunderstanding), (accommodation), (performance), (loss), Brent Biennial 2022, In the House of my Love, in partnership with Build Hollywood and Studio Voltaire. produced by Metroland Cultures.

multiple sites, Willesden and Clapham

8-1 July: Walm Lane, Willesden Green
11-17 July: Dudden Hill Lane, Willesden Green
18-24 July: Clapham High St/Gauden Rd
25-31 July: Clapham High St

Artist Sadia Pineda Hameed presents four billboard artworks as part of her commissions, 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.

- Eliel Jones

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

Billboard text:

(misunderstanding)


Hello how are you?
Good thanks. And you?
Good too. What’s your name?
My name is Sadia Pineda Hameed.
Do you speak Tagalog or Urdu?
I don’t understand.

Kumusta ka?
Mabuti salamat. Ikaw?
Mabuti naman. Anong pangalan mo?
Ako si Sadia Pineda Hameed.
Nagsasalita ka ba ng Tagalog o Urdu?
Hindi ko naiintindihan.

(accommodation)

I am trying to accommodate you.
This language is unlivable.
It moves, you mean?
It shrinks.
It moulds around you in the shape of a shell.

Sinusubukan kong paunlakan ka.
Kay hirap manahan sa wikang ito.
Ibig mong sabihin, gumagalaw ito?
Lumiliit ito.
Niyayakap ka nito sa hulma ng isang kabibe.

(performance)

You are improving.
I am performing proficiency for you.
A performance of diaspora (disintegration, ruin)
I am impossibly many, yet not enough to be one.
Be multitudinous.

Nag-iimprove ka.
Nagpapanggap akong sanay para sa iyo.
Isang dula ng pagkaguho.
Ako ay marami, ngunit hindi ako sapat upang maging isa.
Maging marami pa.

(loss)

You say it will come back to me, but I don't think it will.
I am sorry for your loss.
May no loss fall upon you. May this not touch you in the same way.

Sabi mo babalik sa akin pero sa palagay ko hindi na.
Nakikiramay ako.
Nawa’y walang mawala sayo. Nawa’y hindi ka kailanman mawalan nang ganito.


Images: Thierry Bal