SENYALS
2026. super 16mm and archival super 8mm film (8min), pewter sculpture, sound installation
solo show.
Tangent Projects, Barcelona
27 February - 27 March
Featuring sound, installation and film works, Sadia Pineda Hameed’s exhibition Senyals (‘signals’ in Catalan) explores connections between Wales’ history of mining and strike action and wider global histories of resource extraction and solidarity movements.
Focusing on histories of mutual support between Welsh miners and republican fighters during the Spanish Civil War, the exhibition moves between Wales and Catalonia to consider how voices, signals and covert communications carry solidarity across distance, time and borders when bodies cannot.
The exhibition includes metal sculptures (Long Distant Calls), moving image work (Moving Sound), and a new sculptural sound work (It Belongs Not Only To Us). This new work brings together recordings of black singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson’s transatlantic transmission to Welsh miners, his speech and performance to republican fighters during the Spanish Civil War and oral testimonies from Welsh miner brigaders who fought alongside Catalonians. Through this work, Sadia connects these moments of solidarity across sound, geography and temporality, thereby bridging Wales and Catalonia.
Moving Sound (8min) is a speculative work set across 1980s and near-future Wales, shot on super 16mm. In the film, sounds of present day anti-colonial and anti-capitalist strategies for mining strikes are transmitted from Soundcamp streamboxes to the past via an underground, time travelling broadcast. In the 1980s, workers build DIY receivers from Moving Sound portable audio devices, which they use to distribute the broadcast around sites of production and the everyday. Moving Sound blurs fictional 16mm and archival 8mm footage from Sam Baraitser Smith into covert sonic action to explore how organising converges and enacts across geographies, temporality, fantasy and reality.
Long Distance Calls is a series of sculptural string telephones in the style of commemorative silverware, with each pair joining the shared resistance of mining strikes in Wales and in the Global South. Inspired by Big Pit’s bell system - used by miners to communicate underground in code by touching two metal wires together - Long Distance Calls are votive talismans for organised, underground, quiet signals of international solidarity, that consider how commemoration can function to not only memorialise, but also collectivise resistance against colonial and capitalist resource extraction. The strikes referenced are the Tonypandy Riots (1911), the General Strike (1926), the Miners’ Strike (1984-85), the Brooke’s Point Barricade (2023), the Jujuy Protests (2023) and the Kinshasa Riots (2025).
Also on display are a collection of personal and solidarity pins/badges, inspired by those seen during Sadia’s research and metal casting workshops at the Big Pit, Blaenavon.
Senyals is a continuation and extension of work developed through Perspective(s), a decolonial initiative co-delivered by Arts Council Wales and Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. Earlier versions of the works were first shown in Signals, Sadia’s solo exhibition at the Big Pit National Coal Museum, Blaenavon, which ran from 31 May to 31 August 2025. The exhibition at Tangent Projects re-presents and further develops these works in a new context, marking their first presentation in Spain.
Curated by Tsering Frykman-Glen.
Supported by Wales Arts International’s International Opportunities Fund, Arts Council Wales and Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales’ Perspective(s) and the Welsh Government.
Images: Tanya Zommer
