Big Ideas: Naeem Mohaiemen

Since 2006, artist Naeem Mohaiemen has worked on The Young Man Was, a series of films that explore failed left utopias, considering marginal men within these movements. The work highlights the performance of a certain form of doomed masculinity, and hope against experience. In the most recent iteration Two Meetings and a Funeral (featured at Documenta 14, Kassel), the gaze turns to the left in state power, where misrecognition lays a path toward failure.

But what of the films’ protagonists and the very different stories they might have told, if the form of this project had been autobiography?

In Naeem’s conversations with Peter Custers, the anchor of Last Man in Dhaka Central who died unexpectedly three months after the films premiere in 2015, this tension becomes apparent. The project thinks of frustrated romantic love (“ek gocha rojonogondha”) as a metaphor for the 1970s left; it is a movement that tries again and again. But Peter Custers rejected these readings, which may say something about our conflicting relationship to stories that we consider to be settled.

The camera reframes, and yet the people who live those moments insist that they still have the right to be heard in their own voices, not necessarily in ours.

This talk expands on remarks first given in 2015 at a symposium organized by Art In General with Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York. Reprinted in What Now? The Politics of Listening (Black Dog, UK).

Part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s ‘Big Ideas’ talk series – a platform for renowned speakers, from scholars and thinkers to curators and artists, to share and discuss their current research and work.

Supported by the Stanley Picker Trust.