Anonymous, this is not about any one person or a particular artist. This project is akin to finding fading pages from an anonymous diary and placing them in a time capsule for future generations.
•
Naeem Mohaiemen
Artist / Filmmaker
Naeem Mohaiemen’s essays, films and installations are works about the unreliability of memory in many registers: individual, familial, collective and official. His practice is framed by his upbringing in Dhaka in the 1970s and 80s, a time of deep political turbulence in Bangladesh (the former East Pakistan) after a violent separation from Pakistan. These two decades saw the nation’s hopes, initially imbued with socialism and secularism, fade in a succession of military coups and dictatorships. Drawing on the film and video archive and its erasures, both as material and metaphor to revisit the impact of ruptures in history on individuals, Mohaiemen interweaves his family histories with the unofficial record of former Left utopias, in the post-war period framed by decolonization and world socialism.
Throughout Mohaiemen’s work, displacement can be seen in its literal form in the treatment of global histories of post-colonial socialism, with references to migration, exile, geopolitics and buried family secrets across several countries and epochs. The works focus on the margins of major historical events, and shift perspectives towards narrating non-Western histories. ON a metaphorical level, it can be seen in Mohaiemen’s attempt to create new meanings from fragmented testimonies, slips in memory and gaps in the archive, opening the way to fictionalization. His ongoing obsession with the previous century’s struggle between capitalism and socialism, between colony and metropole, between West and non-West, always comes back to this question: what would have been our other possible futures, if events had unfolded differently?
–Elsa Coustou, Assistant Curator, Contemporary British Art, Tate
•
RELATED ARTICLES
-
Aesthetica Art Prize 2022Deadline August 31, 2021
The Aesthetica Art Prize was launched in 2007, five years after the launch of Aesthetica Magazine, as a way to support the next generation of talent across new visual media. (more…)
-
FotografiskaPhotography Center
Fotografiska is an international meeting place where everything revolves around photography. Located in the heart of Stockholm, with additional locations in New York, London and Tallinn (more…)
-
Alec SothPhotographer
Alec Soth’s work is rooted in the distinctly American tradition of ‘on-the-road photography’ developed by Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore. From Huckleberry Finn to Easy Rider there seems to be a uniquely American desire to travel and chronicle the adventures that consequently ensue. (more…)
-
For The Sake of CalmnessNewsha Tavakolian
Thomas Erben Gallery is very excited to present Tehran based Newsha Tavakolian’s For the Sake of Calmness (19min, 2020). The film depicts a bifurcated state of mind, removed from the real world while being hyper sensitively affected by it. (more…)
-
Flavio-ShiróA Documentary
Flavio-Shiró is a cult artist, a painter’s painter. His work defies categorization or association with any artistic group or movement. For more than six decades, his work has simply been modern.
-
William EgglestonPhotographer
William Eggleston is one of the most influential photographers of the latter half of the 20th century, credited with pioneering fine art color photography in his iconic depictions of the American South. (more…)
-
Dario MaglionicoArtist / Painter
Dario Maglionico was born in Naples in 1986. After graduating in Biomedical Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Milan, from 2014 he lived and worked in Milan, devoting himself exclusively to painting. (more…)
-
Diary of a PandemicMagnum photographers
The COVID-19 outbreak has imposed restrictions in movement. As part of an ongoing initiative, photographers of Magnum Photo are sharing information and new work made in these strange and difficult times.
