Naeem Mohaiemen (Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Head of Photography Concentration at Columbia University) is a visual artist and academic who combines photography, films, and essays to research the many forms of utopia-dystopia (families, borders, architecture, and uprisings) in the Muslim World after 1945. Several conversations in contemporary art museums around the historic Non Aligned Movement pivoted around the premiere of his three-channel film, Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), at documenta 14, which featured Vijay Prashad (The Darker Nations, 2007), Samia Zennadi (L’Afrique parle livres), and Zonayed Saki (Gana Samhati Party). He is author of Midnight’s Third Child (Dhaka: Nokta / University of Liberal Arts, 2023) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); editor of Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Dhaka: Drishtipat,2010); and co-editor with Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must be Defended (Budapest: Tranzit / University of Budapest, 2023) and with Lorenzo Fusi of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sienna: Sylvana, 2007). Monographs on his art practice include What We Found After You Left (Toronto: Power Plant, 2021). Mohaiemen has a Ph.D. in Anthropology and was a Senior Research Fellow at Lunder Institute of American Art at Colby College prior to joining the Columbia faculty. He is a Guggenheim Fellow (film-video 2014) and was a finalist for Britain’s Turner Prize (2018).

Working Group: Seeds of Diaspora