Live True Life or Die Trying
Naeem Mohaiemen
Curated by DJ Spooky
September 10 – October 31, 2009
Opening reception, Thursday, September 10, 6-8pm
Cue Art Foundation
511 West 25th Street,
New York
http://www.cueartfoundation.org
Discussion, Thursday, September 17th, 7 pm
Mohaiemen in conversation with Vijay Prashad, author of Darker Nations: A People’s History Of The Third World and Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity.
Related projects
http://shobak.org
Informed by two Chris Marker films that are decades apart in political exhaustion, Grin Without A Cat (grand disillusion with interlinked global left revolutions) and Case of the Grinning Cat (anti-war movement with foretold conclusion), Naeem applies these polarities to political movements that he participates in or documents. Looking at a single day in January 2009, he follows two political rallies that happen in two parts of Dhaka. The first by a new group of young Islamists– an event where he finds no familiar faces, “except among the photographers”. Yet he also notes the energy: “These are not the Islamists we lazily lampooned in the 1980s. Now their rhetoric has a sharp edge and reality tint. When they argue that gangster capitalism has failed and is dragging down the world, that the global compact is imploding, it’s a resonant message for many.”
The second rally, later in the afternoon, organized by a group of Leftists on the university campus. In this one, Naeem is back in his comfort zone, meeting familiar friends, joining in enthusiastically, sometimes marching and chanting, sometimes walking backwards trying to capture a “dramatic” photo. Through it all though, a queasy feeling: of the awareness that this second rally is so much smaller, of the inevitability of Left decline, of recognizing his own desire to zoom in for a close shot. The better to inflate the size of the crowd. His camera is soaked in bias and sympathy.
Naeem Mohaiemen is a writer & artist working in Dhaka & New York. He uses text, video, and photography to explore historic markers in post-partition South Asia. He founded Visible Collective, whose projects ( http://disappearedinamerica.org ) looked at globally interlinked national security panic. Naeem also works on activist projects in Bangladesh. He writes the chapter on religious and ethnic minorities in the Ain Salish Kendro Annual Human Rights report ( http://askbd.org ), as well as being a member of local activist networks ( http://unheardvoice.net/blog ). Working between two countries, this work delineates the contradictions between Bengalis in marginal migrant status in Northern countries, and majoritarian (and authoritarian) status inside Bangladesh.
His essays include Collectives in Atomised Time (with Doug Ashford, Idensitat), Fear of a Muslim Planet: Islamic Roots of Hip-Hop (Sound Unbound, DJ Spooky ed., MIT Press; runner-up for Villem Flusser Theory Award), Mujtoba Ali: Amphibian Man (The Rest of Now, Rana Dasgupta ed., Manifesta 7, Trentino), Everybody Wants To Be Singapore (The Good Life, Carlos Motta, Art in General), Adman Blues Become Artist Liberation (Indian Highway, Hans Ulrich Obrist & Julia Peyton-Jones, Serpentine Gallery), Beirut: Illusion of a Silver Porsche (Men of Global South, Adam Jones ed., Zed Books), and Why Mahmud Can’t be a Pilot (Nobody Passes, Matt Bernstein ed., Seal Press), etc.
Live True Life or Die Trying at Cue Art Foundation is Naeem’s first solo show in America. Supported in part by Rhizome, Franklin Furnace and New Museum’s “New Silent Series”. This is part of a longer exploration of underground left movements, a Creative Capital project.
Cue Art Foundation, 511 West 25th Street, New York.
