Naeem Mohaiemen
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Naeem Mohaiemen

Naeem Mohaiemen is currently working on The Young Man Was, a series of films exploring the 1970s revolutionary Left. His protagonists often display misrecognition, ending up as ‘accidental Trojan horses’ carrying tragic results (from Japanese hijackers commandeering Dhaka airport for ‘solidarity’, to migrant labor pipelines transformed into PLO ‘volunteers’). In spite of its failures, Naeem’s reading of the potential of international Left solidarity is still one of hope tinged with caution. His other projects explore borders, wars, and belonging, most recently Volume Eleven, flaw in the algorithm of cosmopolitanism (South / documenta 14 journal), about his great uncle’s unfortunate admiration for the German military machine. Historian Afsan Chowdhury (whose diary inspired The Young Man Was project) has bracketed the work of Naeem, Yasmine Saikia, Dina Siddiqi, Nayanika Mookherjee, and Bina D’Costa as a “second wave of history writing” about Asia. Naeem is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Columbia University.