An art less ordinary

In the last week of January, days before he was about to leave New York for Dhaka to attend the second edition of the Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) 2014, New York and Dhaka-based writer and visual artist Naeem Mohaiemen found himself explaining his art to a NY cabbie. “I work with different mediums, photo, film…” The cabbie interjected to peddle his Pakistani actor friend. “No, these are not those kinds of films, these talk about the history of Bangladesh. Histories after 1971 and how things went horribly wrong; what happens after wars, and new borders,” says Mohaiemen, who is based between New York and Dhaka.

“In the context of Bangladesh, history is never past and the pressure to create shothik itihaas (correct history) is immense,” says Mohaiemen in an interview. The visual arts with its endless possibilities for dualism, ambiguity, offers the space to “unfurl and unravel” these complicated histories, indeed, presents.

Which is why, since 1993, this 44-year-old former student of economics and history has pursued his historical quests, through art. Combining archival research, critical “absences”, personal and pop culture anecdotes, Mohaiemen fills in gaps, challenges and complicates popular narratives of history in Bangladesh, in particular, narratives of the ultra left, through his ongoing series of deleted video works, The Young Man Was.

The just-concluded DAS for instance, featured, among others, one of the works from this series, United Red Army: The Young Man Was Part 1, which was recently acquired by the Tate Modern. The 70-minute video is about the hijacking of Japan Airlines Flight 472 en route from Paris to Tokyo to Dhaka, by a unit of the Japanese Red Army in September 1977, and Mohaiemen’s memories as an eight-year-old frustrated at the suspension of his favourite TV Show, The Zoo Gang. The film — grainy clips from the original hostage crisis broadcast, alongside cheerful opening credits of Zoo Gang — woven together by Mohaeimen’s voiceover is simultaneously a real, chilling reminder of gruesome political realities colliding with innocent personal ones.

The personal and political also collide in another work, Rankin Street, 1953 which uses photographs of an old family house (taken by Mohaiemen’s father in 1953), demolished in the ’70s, to comment on “the hypercapitalism of present-day Dhaka/Bangladesh,” versus the past that it left behind. “The images capture a form of family life that has been rendered impossible by a property development boom (all old houses are destined to be ugly high-rises). Somewhere in here is the archeology of a ghost city in the first decade of the Pakistan era, vanquished by the dystopia of Bangladesh’s contemporary hypercapitalism project,” says Mohaiemen. “Amitav Ghosh prefigured this moment in The Shadow Lines, when one of his characters sadly said, while looking at the city, ‘But where is Dhaka? I can’t find Dhaka’.”

Mohaiemen’s art is not meant to visually please the audience, instead it forces your imagination to visualise where no image exists. The United Red Army, for instance, takes place mainly in darkness. 

While this is in keeping with the absences in history and documentation (with every change of guard, State documents are reportedly destroyed and removed), this is also part of Mohaiemen’s attempt at “investigating a minimal aesthetic” driven by the desire to challenge the notion of art as a rarefied space, and that “everyone is an artist.” Including the audience.

His Shokol Choritro Kalponik (“all characters are imaginary”), a work which premiered at the summit, traces this line of “art as everyday” thought to its logical conclusion, the vernacular daily newspaper. The project is a fictitious newspaper which imagines an alternate course of history for the subcontinent: here Delhi pays homage to border crossers by building a memorial to Felani (the Bangladeshi girl shot on the border by the BSF) outside the Indian Parliament. Karachi has to repay historical debt. Bangladesh wins the 2022 Soccer World Cup, the Dhaka Knight Riders drop Gautam Gambhir from BPL and in an ultimate sign of the country’s prosperity, it gets its first corporate honcho, a towering giant in the world of egg production, on the Forbes list. Combining the real with the imagined, the solemn with the ridiculous, the newspaper takes the imagination into terrains where it wouldn’t typically go.  

While on the one hand there has been much international acclaim — his works being acquired by the Tate Modern, British Museum, and soon to premier at the MOMA — Mohaiemen doesn’t always find it easy to explain his school of art to people, including older artists who have mentored his work. He recalls how the late Kolkata-based artist-activist Shanu Lahiri would puzzle over how he could make an artwork without his brush touching paper.

The cabbie on the other hand — on learning details of Mohaiemen’s work — had a word of advice for him. “Okay but don’t mind, let me say one thing. You think this is what Pakistan, Bangladesh need? Always looking at the past? We’ve got to move forward. These films need to have lessons. So listen, take my number. You never know maybe one day you will need a Pakistani actor. He is very handsome.”

(Shreya Ray is a writer and musician based in Delhi)