Modern Mondays [2017]
On the occasion of the MoMA PS1 exhibition Naeem Mohaiemen: There Is No Last Man, Naeem Mohaiemen is joined by Stuart Comer, Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art, for a screening and discussion of his work. Since 2006, Mohaiemen has worked on The Young Man Was, a history of the revolutionary Left during the 1970s, in which the tragic misrecognition of allies, a performative and doomed masculinity, and the loneliness of survivors have been repeated concerns. In two projects premiered at documenta 14 earlier this year, Mohaiemen returned to these questions through filmmaking strategies that are new to his practice. In his first fiction film, Tripoli Cancelled, which premiered at documenta 14 in Athens and is currently on view at MoMA PS1, the entwining of family history with world events is pushed to slow absurdity. The film’s notion of a man at the edge of hope owes a debt to Elia Suleiman’s 2002 film Divine Intervention. In Two Meetings and a Funeral, which premiered at documenta 14 in Kassel, the artist’s documentary gaze focuses on the Left through the “official socialism” of state power, charting Bangladesh’s political shift from the Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Algeria in 1973 to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation meeting in Lahore in 1974. The three-channel video sketches the space of decolonization and nonalignment, influenced by the interplay between John Akomfrah’s single-channel Stuart Hall Project (2013) and his related three-channel installation The Unfinished Conversation (2013).