A Conversation with Naeem Mohaiemen: In Messy Practice

 

Building on the experience of editing the anthology Solidarity Must Be Defended (2023), Mohaiemen probes examples of transnational misrecognition, errors in alliances, and failures to transform the mechanisms of power after a successful revolution. These failures circulate several questions, including one that has animated our inquiry: Is every action capable of building solidarity, or can it become anti-solidarity when carried out with challenging allies, ambiguous manifestos, and accelerated timelines? This is a partial story of the dream of working beyond borders, inhabited by dramatic protagonists and triumphant moments, coming together (and apart) across many fissures, fault lines, and utopias.

 

 

Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, photography, drawings, and essays to explore forms of utopia-dystopia within families, borders, architecture, and uprisings– beginning from South Asia and then radiating outward to transnational collisions in the Muslim world after 1945. Several conversations around “nonalignment” as a concept container in contemporary art pivoted after the premiere of his film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017) at Documenta 14. He is Director of Undergraduate Studies, Visual Arta, at School of Arts, Columbia University.