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Naeem Mohaiemen’s research-led practice encompasses films, installations, and essays about transnational left politics in the period after the Second World War. He investigates the legacies of decolonisation and the erasing and rewriting of memories of political utopias. Mohaiemen combines autobiography and family history to explore how national borders and passports shape the lives of people in turbulent societies. His work focuses on film archives and the way their contents can be lost, fabricated and reanimated. The hope for an as-yet unborn international left, instead of alliances of race and religion, forms his work.
Solo exhibitions include: Solidarity Must be Defended, Mahmoud Darwish Museum, Ramallah (2017); There is no Last Man, MoMA PS1, New York (2017); Prisoners of Shothik Itihash, Kunsthalle Basel (2014); The Young Man Was, Experimenter, Kolkata (2011); Live True Life or Die Trying, Cue Art Foundation, New York (2009); and My Mobile Weighs a Ton, Gallery Chitrak, Dhaka (2008). Group shows include: Lahore Biennial (2018); Active Forms, Sharjah (2018); documenta 14 (2017); LUX/ICO Artists’ Cinema, UK (2016); 56th Venice Biennale (2015); Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014); Dhaka Art Summit (2014); Kiran Nadar, Delhi (2013); British Museum (2013); Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011); Lines of Control, Karachi/ Dubai/ Bradford (2009); Chobi Mela V, Dhaka (2009); Home Works 3, Beirut (2005); and Queens Museum of Art, New York (2005). The work is represented by LUX (UK) and Experimenter (India).
[Source] tate.org.uk
Grace (2023), Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), Tripoli Cancelled (2017), Abu Ammar is Coming (2016), Last Man in Dhaka Central (The Young Man Was, Part III) (2015), Afsan’s Long Day (The Young Man Was, Part II) (2014), Rankin Street, 1953 (2013), United Red Army (The Young Man Was, Part I) (2012)
Spanning Partition to contemporary Bangladesh, this programme journeys through fractured homes and unfinished films to ask how history lingers in bodies, cities, and celluloid. Between memory and the archives, the works trace disappearance, displacement, and the stubborn afterlives of images in the face of erasure.
The quiet radiance of everyday acts emerges between a beautiful portrait of a Bangladeshi centenarian and a tender chronicle of a woman choosing a dignified death. This Focus programme touches on themes of ageing, autonomy, and what it means to inhabit—and ultimately release—the body.
Intimate portraits of everyday life and struggle in Bangladesh speak together with playful, inter-textual vignettes exploring the confluence of autobiography and radical history. Together, Naeem Mohaiemen and Molla Sagar‘s films trace how personal memory and political upheaval collide, overlap, and refract across generations.
