Born in 1969 in London, he currently works in Dhaka and New York. Naeem Mohaiemen combines essays, films, drawings and installations to research socialist utopias, incomplete decolonisations, language wars and shifting borders. His work has taken on the state-sanctioned urge to enforce ‘correct history’, decolonial moments that replicate old oppressions in new forms, the obscuring of class as a mode of thinking through the idea of utopia, and the hegemonic and suffocating position of the English language.
Mohaiemen’s work has been shown at the Bengal Foundation, Dhaka (2020); Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2019); Chobi Mela, Dhaka (2009, 2016, 2019); Tate Britain, London (2018); Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); MoMA PS1, New York (2017); Mahmoud Darwish Museum, Ramallah (2017); documenta 14 (2017); Marrakech Biennale 6 (2016); 56th Venice Biennale (2015); Dhaka Art Summit (2014); Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011); The Third Line, Dubai (2009); Whitney Biennial of American Art, New York (2006); and Queens Museum of Art, New York (2005). His work can be found in the collections of Sharjah Art Foundation; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kiran Nadar Museum, Delhi; Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern, London; and British Museum, London.
He is the author of Midnight’s Third Child (Nokta, 2020) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); editor of Between Ashes and Hope: Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Drishtipat, 2010); and co-editor (w/ Eszter Szakacs) of Solidarity Must Be Defended (Van Abbe-Salt-Tricontinental-Tranzit, 2020) and (w/ Lorenzo Fusi) of System Error (Papesse, 2007).
Mohaiemen received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014). He was a finalist for the Herb Alpert Award (2019), Turner Prize (2018), Merz Prize (2015) and Vilem Flusser Theory Award (2009).
These presentations and panel discussion at MoMA brought together four filmmakers and artists who work in expanded documentary modes, using existing footage, archival research, interviews, and scripted narratives to produce imaginative accounts of transnational struggles, solidarities, and interventions. Using moving images, some of these practitioners interrogate the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the mid-late 20th…
MoMA’s C-MAP research program developed an extended focus on historical alliances such as Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, and other south-south, east-east, and Third World nexuses. This conversation addresses such pasts, and their reverberations in the present, as they appear in Mohaiemen’s media-based practice.
