Naeem Mohaiemen

Naeem Mohaiemen researches Bangladesh’s two postcolonial markers (1947 and 1971), creating multi-media art about borders, war, and belonging. In the documentary film series The Young Man Was (shobak. org), Mohaiemen addresses the tragic utopia of 1970s revolutionary movements. Chapters include United Red Army (Sharjah Biennial 2011), Afsan’s Long Day (MoMA Documentary Fortnight), and, most recently, Last Man in Dhaka Central, which follows a Dutch journalist who was jailed after the 1975 soldiers’ mutiny in Bangladesh. The film was supported by a Creative Time Global Residency and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and it premiered at the 2015 Biennale di Venezia. Historian Afsan Chowdhury has characterized Mohaiemen’s work, along with that of Nayanika Mukherjee, Bina D’Costa, Dina M. Siddiqi, and Yasmin Saikia as a “second wave of history writing” about Bangladesh. Mohaiemen is also a PhD candidate in Historical Anthropology at Columbia University.