Artist Statement

Slide sets

The images in Mohaiemen’s slides show re-stagings of the interstices between political life, surveillance, and the media, in a globalised world. They display a skewed glance at reality from the perspective of shadow puppet theater. Military camps, building demolitions, wall slogans, demonstrations, and personal details merge into a narrative about the foundations of distrust in digital culture.
Sound: Kaffe Matthews

• Naeem Mohaiemen is an artist and writer working in Dhaka and New York. He uses text, photography and video to explore histories of the international left and utopia-dystopia slippage. Mohaiemen’s projects have been shown at venues including Gallery Chitrak (Dhaka), Experimenter (Kolkata), Third Line (Dubai), Ashkal Alwan (Beirut), Queens Museum of Art (New York), Shedhalle (Zurich) and the Finnish Museum of Photography. He organised the Visible Collective, a group of artists, lawyers and activists who had a video project shown at the 2004 Whitney Biennial (‘Wrong Gallery’). Excerpts from his current research on 1970s ultra-left movements will be shown at the 2011 Sharjah Biennial. Naeem also works on activist projects in Bangladesh. He writes on religious and ethnic minorities in the Ain Salish Kendro Annual Report (askbd.org) and the Daily Star newspaper (thedailystar.net). Working between two countries, this work explores contradictions between Bengalis in marginal  migrant status in northern countries, and majoritarian (and authoritarian) status inside Bangladesh. As part of this work, his film Muslims or Heretics: My Camera Can Lie was screened for an ancillary meeting of the EU Human Rights Commission at the UK House of Lords. shobak.org

Full text (PDF) p. 76-79