MONDAY NOVEMBER 27 AT 7PM

Since 2006, Naeem Mohaiemen has explored defeated utopias in an ongoing project – The Young Man Was, a history of the 1970s revolutionary left. As part of this, in Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), a critically acclaimed three-channel film recently premiered in Documenta 14 in Kassel, Mohaiemen emphasizes the left in state power, and henceforth, to its eventual failure through misrecognition. In this artist talk at YSoA, Mohaiemen poses what different stories may have come out if the form were autobiography. In his conversations with Dutch journalist Peter Custers, the protagonist of Last Man in Dhaka Central (2015), “unrequited love” surfaces as a metaphor for the 1970s left as a movement that attempted to, unsuccessfully, revive itself in later years.

About the Artist

Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, installations, and essays to research failed left utopias and incomplete decolonizations– framed by Third World Internationalism and World Socialism. The terrain is a “a revolutionary past meaningful in the sudden eruption of a revolutionary present” (Kaelen Wilson-Goldie). In spite of underscoring a left tendency toward misrecognition, a hope for an as-yet unborn international left, as the only future alternative to silos of race and religion, is a basis for the work. Project chapters have shown at documenta 14, Kiran Nadar, Ashkal Alwan, Sharjah, Marrakech, and Venice Biennales, Tate Britain, and MoMA. His essays include “Islamic roots of Hip-Hop” (Sound Unbound, 2008), “Traitors, a Mutable Lexicon” (e-flux Supercommunity, 2015), “Anabasis of the Japanese Red Army” (e-flux Journal, 2015), and “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Campaign” (Assuming Boycott/Walker Art Center, 2017). Naeem is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Columbia University researching left histories outside state patronage.