NAEEM MOHAIEMEN

The exhibition marks the Kolkata premiere of Mohaiemen’s new film A Missing Can of Film (2025), which explores the legacy of filmmaker Zahir Raihan and the role of cinema in Bangladesh’s Liberation War, including those completed in exile in Kolkata. Combining hectic collages of Raihan’s footage with contemporary scenes filmed at the Film Development Corporation, eerily deserted after the 2024 Bangladesh Student Uprising, the work returns to the concept of “prisoners of shothik itihash (correct history)”, first expressed in his 2014 solo, and companion book, at Kunsthalle Basel curated by Adam Szymczyk.

Extending this exploration of the “long seventies”, the exhibition also presents Jamahiriya Means People: Okba Ibn Naafa (2025), a series of prints inspired by the obsessive reading habits of Mohaiemen’s father, a Bangladeshi surgeon who worked in Libya during the 1970s as part of a government exchange programme in the shadow of the “nonaligned movement” (explored in Mohaiemen’s Turner Prize nominated film Two Meetings and a Funeral, which premiered in 2017 at Documenta 14). Through an imagined library of books, the series considers the lived experience of socialist internationalism in the first decade of global “skilled labor” migration.

The exhibition finally turns to the intimate archive in Karen’s Last Books (Ibsen to Nguyen), based on the final reading list of Karen Wentworth, before her death by voluntary euthanasia in 2023. Through drawings of book covers, excerpts, and fragments of Karen’s conversation, the work reflects on reading as a way of making meaning in the face of mortality, while continuing the artist’s interest in those who can choose their final traces (Wentworth) and those who are denied that choice (Raihan).

Across film and works on paper, Raihan – Ghatak – Tarkovsky brings together transnational histories of the illusion of choice, revealing how archives—whether cinematic, literary, or familial—shape our understanding of the undying ghosts of the past in the present.

Naeem Mohaiemen works in Dhaka and New York. He is Chair of the Visual Arts Department at Columbia University.