Naeem Mohaiemen

Writing

Naeem is author of Prisoners of Shothik Itihash. He edited the anthologies Between Ashes and Hope: Chittagong Hill Tracts in the blind spot of Bangladesh nationalism, Collectives in atomised time, and System Error: War is a force that gives us meaning.

He was the primary critic of Dead Reckoning, a book by Sarmila Bose on the 1971 war of Bangladesh. His response was cited by the BBC and published in Economic & Political Weekly ("Waiting for a real reckoning on 1971"). Sarmila Bose responded to his remarks in the same periodical, followed by a rebuttal from Mohaiemen.

Essays on Bangladesh history include"Muktijuddho: Polyphony of the Ocean", "Accelerated Media and the 1971 Genocide", "Musee Guimet as Proxy Fight", "Mujtaba Ali: Amphibian Man" (The Rest of Now, Rana Dasgupta ed.), "Mujib Coat" (Bidoun journal), and "Everybody wants to be Singapore" (Carlos Motta’s The Good Life). He wrote the chapter on religious and ethnic minorities in the Ain o Salish Kendro Annual Report for Bangladesh.

Essays on diaspora include "Known unknowns of the class war" (Margins, Asian American Writers Workshop),"The skin I'm in: Afro-Bengali solidarity and possible futures" (Margins, Asian American Writers Workshop), "Beirut, Silver Porsche Illusion" (Men of the Global South, Zed Books), "Why Mahmud Can’t Be a Pilot" (Nobody Passes: Rejecting the rules of Gender and Conformity, Seal Press), and "No Exit" (Asian Superhero Comics, New Press).

Essays on culture include "Islamic Roots of HipHop" (Sound Unbound, MIT Press; Runner Up for Villem Flusser Theory Award),"Adman blues become artist liberation" (Indian Highway, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist) and "At the coed dance " (Art Lies: Death of the Curator).

Film

The films in The Young Man Was series (2006-2016) include United Red Army, about the 1977 hijacking of Japan Airlines Flight 472 by the Japanese Red Army. United Red Army premiered at Sharjah Biennial, Hot Docs, and IDFA. It has shown at various museums, including The New Museum in New York and is in the permanent collection of the Tate Modern museum in London. Part 2, Afsan's Long Day premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2014 as part of "Doc Fortnight". It had a festival premiere at Oberhausen and a British premiere at the BFI London Film Festival. Part 3, Last Man in Dhaka Central premiered at the 56th Venice Biennial 2015, as part of "All The World's Futures" curated by Okwui Enwezor. Part 4 is the short film Abu Ammar is Coming (2016).

The films in the Prisoners of Shothik Itihash series are Rankin Street 1953 (2009) and Der Weisse Engel. (2008). The short films in the Disappeared in America series (2002-2006, as member of Visible Collective) are Patriot Story (2004, with Jawad Metni), Fear of Flying (2005, with Anjali Malhotra), Lingering: Twenty (2005, with Sehban Zaidi), Invisible Man (2006), and as a solo project, White Teeth (Your Mysterious Neighbours) (2011).

The latest films are Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017) at Documenta 14 in Kassel (which derives from The Young Man Was project) and Tripoli Cancelled (2017), his first fiction feature film.

Installation

Naeem co-founded Visible Collective, a collective of New York-based artists and lawyers investigating security panic. Visible's work exhibited internationally, including the 2006 Whitney Biennial of American Art ("Wrong Gallery" room) and L’institut des cultures d’Islam in Paris. His solo projects have looked at military coups ("My Mobile Weighs A Ton" at Dhaka Gallery Chitrak), surveillance ("Otondro Prohori, Guarding Who?", Chobi Mela V at Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy), Indian partition ("Kazi in Nomansland" at Dubai Third Line), architectural nationalism ("Penn Station Kills Me" at Exit Art), and dueling leftist and Islamist politics ("Live True Life or Die Trying" at Cue Art Foundation, New York). Chapters from his ongoing research on the 1970s ultra left have shown at the Pavilion (Bucharest), New Museum (New York), Frieze Art Fair (London), and MUAC Mexico City.

Press

The work has been featured in Granta, Modern Painters ("Art & War"),Art Review, Rethinking Marxism, Springerin, Arab Studies Journal, New York Times, and Brooklyn Rail.

Education

Naeem graduated from Oberlin College in 1993 with a BA in Economics and Concentration in History. He was a member of the college's Board of Trustees for the 1994-1996 term. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology, with a Certificate in Comparative Literature, at Columbia University.