ART CITIES:Istanbul-Prisoners of Correct History

Naeem Mohaiemen’s projects explore the intersecting regional histories of South Asia and its leftist uprisings 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. His protagonists might be categorized as “support acts” in the unspooling reel of official chronicles: revolutionaries, novelists, double agents, martyrs, theorists.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: SALT Archive

Naeem Mohaiemen’s films, installations, and essays analyze the formation and collapse of the Third World internationalism through Bangladesh’s complicated postcolonial journey, focusing on three ruptures:the 1905 partition of Bengal within British India, the 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan, and the 1971 war that split East and West Pakistan into today’s Bangladesh and Pakistan. At the margins of these turbulent events were interlinked leftist uprisings in other parts of the world during the 1970s. Using newsreel footage and found photographs as well as contemporary restagings, Mohaiemen examines why the idea of a socialist “utopia” in postcolonial nations has faded, replaced by hypercapital desires and pious politics. Drawn from family narratives, popular culture, and national mythology, the works reveal anonymous and recognizable protagonists moving from the early 1950s to the 1970s, always reflecting the role of unreliable memory in both official and informal histories. “Prisoners of Correct History” at SALT Beyoğlu is influenced by Mohaiemen’s ideas about the possibility of the cultural institution as pages of a transnational history book. Centering the work of human memory, the artist problematizes the Bengali term shothik itihash, translated as “correct history.” He assembles a narrative by piecing together a number of shared myths—a missing can of film, a wrong man, and a censored document—to tell stories of loss and failure, with a glimmer of hope, and also caution about future politics. The audience is left to question whether the protagonists are the commanders or prisoners of state-controlled historiography. The exhibition spreads across two floors as well as to the Walk-in Cinema, where “Tripoli Cancelled” (2017), a fable about a man who lives in a non-place, will be screened at programmed times. Starting on the third floor, the film “United Red Army” (2011) and accompanying “United Red Army: Timeline (1968-1977)” (2012) examine a moment when the Third World hit back, refracted through the Japanese Red Army’s hazy attachment to the Palestinian cause. “You Will Roam Like a Madwoman” (2014) looks at a popular Bangladeshi magazine of the 1970s, mixing new patriotism, consumer feminism, and revolutionary 70s zeitgeist. Intersecting with SALT Beyoğlu’s location on Istiklal Street, historically and politically charged as a site for demonstrations, “My Mobile Weighs A Ton” (2008) and “Live True Life or Die Trying” (2009) address the function of photography, new technologies, and coded language within student protests taking place in Bangladesh. The artist’s questioning of the archive continues on the second floor with “Abu Ammar is Coming” (2016), which explores a darker explanation for an iconic photograph of “foreign fighters in the PLO. “The Year 1973 Created Many Problems for the Imperialists” (2013) reflects on the misplaced optimism that imperialist forces had “finally gone too far” and would now face defeat, a theme Mohaiemen returns to in “Two Meetings and a Funeral” (2017). In “Rankin Street 1953, Blueprints” (2013), the artist reconstructs a family home fallen to the forces of aggressive capital that have erased an old city and extended family form. The installation, “Kazi in Nomansland” (2008), excavates the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, who is the only person to appear on the stamps of all three of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children—India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—revealing a shared, and disputed, national history after the partition of British India.

Info: SALT Beyoğlu, kurucu Garanti Bankası, Bankalar Caddesi 11, Karaköy, İstanbul, Duration 23/1-28/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-29:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, https://saltonline.org