MTA dawn to dusk [2022] | in response to Diller + Scofidio, Refresh [1998]
Naeem Mohaiemen
MTA dawn to dusk, 2022; in response to Diller + Scofidio, Refresh, 1998
Dia Chelsea, Artists on Artists Lecture Series, September 17, 2022
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In 1998 Diller + Scofidio created Refresh for Dia’s Artist Web Projects series. The work was centered around a dozen live webcams in offices around the world. Diller + Scofidio fabricated a narrative for each location to reflect on the effect of live video on everyday life.
For his Artists on Artists lecture, Naeem Mohaiemen has changed the number of sites, time span, and locations referenced in Diller + Scofidio’s project—from twelve offices to one (Marina Tabassum Architects), from one year to one day, and from Western cities to a two-room Dhaka office. The Apple icon from 1998 that was used in Refresh is replaced by the spinning color wheel. Certain signifiers are quixotically off-limits. Waiting for time to pass is the universal constant.
The project will be accompanied by a conversation between Mohaiemen and Marina Tabassum.
Naeem Mohaiemen combines film, photography, and essays to research forms of utopia and dystopia beginning from South Asia’s two postcolonial markers (1947 and 1971) and radiating outward to transnational alliances and collisions in the Muslim world after 1945. A through line in his work is the family unit as a locus for pain-beauty dyads, abandoned buildings as staging grounds for lost souls, and the necessity of small deviations from the truth to keep on living. He is the author of Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (2014) and Midnight’s Third Child (forthcoming in 2022) and co-editor of Solidarity Must be Defended (2023). Mohaiemen is associate professor of visual arts and concentration head of photography at Columbia University, New York.
Marina Tabassum founded the Dhaka-based firm Marina Tabassum Architects in 2005 after ten years as a partner and co-founder of URBANA, Dhaka. She is the founder and chair of the Foundation for Architecture and Community Equity and chair of the Prokritee board. In addition to lecturing widely, Tabassum has taught at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Technical University, Delft, Netherlands; University of Texas at Arlington; and BRAC University, Dhaka. She received an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Munich. Her honors include the Lisbon Triennale Lifetime Achievement Award; the Aga Khan Award for Architecture; the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Gold Medal of the French Academy of Architecture; the Soane Medal from Sir John Soane Museum, London; and the Jameel Prize from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.