ART CITIES:N.York-Naeem Mohaiemen

Naeem Mohaiemen works with using essays, films, and photography, his projects explore the intersecting regional histories of South Asia and its leftist uprisings, the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, and the role of misrecognition within global solidarity. They are narrated via a personally invested dramaturgy, which incorporates family annotations and popular culture in its reflections on history.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MoMA Archive

Naeem Mohaiemen in his solo exhibition “There Is No Last Man” at MoMA PS1 brings together two distinct works “Tripoli Cancelled” (2017) and “Volume Eleven (flaw in the algorithm of cosmopolitanism)” (2016), imagining a relationship between two lonely narrators, each trapped at the edge of history. Loosely inspired by his father’s experience of being stuck in Ellinikon International Airport in Athens, Greece for nine days in 1977 after losing his passport “Tripoli Cancelled” (2017), follows the daily rituals of a man stranded in an abandoned airport. The film was shot in this same airport  and follows a week in the life of a man who has been living in an airport for a decade, keeping himself sane through a daily routine of letters to his wife, fantasies of flying an aging jumbo jet, staging scenes with mannequins in flight attendant uniforms and reading a precious copy of the children’s book ‘”Watership Down”. The film is a haunting metaphorical take on the physical and mental isolation of the migrant experience. Designed by architect Eero Saarinen in the 1960s, Ellinikon International Airport was abandoned in 2001. After its closure the northwest portion of the airport was redeveloped, converting runways into a sports park that housed the 2004 Summer Olympics venues for canoe/kayak slalom, field hockey, baseball, and softball. Ellinikon recently was used to house refugees entering Greece, and then proposed as a site for luxury real estate development during European Union negotiations over Greek debt. “Volume Eleven (flaw in the algorithm of cosmopolitanism)” (2016) comprises diptychs that investigate six problematic essays by Mohaiemen’s great uncle, the Bengali writer Syed Mujtaba Ali, who mistakenly embraced German military might as an antidote to British colonial rule in India. When the artist began translating Ali’s short stories of the late 1930s, he was dismayed to discover several writings in which Ali expressed a hope that Nazi Germany would defeat Britain and liberate India from colonial rule. The works explore the intellectual underpinnings of this short-lived fascination with German political thought among a wide range of Indian intellectuals of the period.

Info: MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, New York, Duration: 22/10/17-11/3/18, Days & Hours: Mon & Thu-sun 12:00-18:00, www.moma.org