Tripoli Cancelled

Fri, 27.07.2018
6:00 PM Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata

A film by Naeem Mohaiemen
92 minutes, 2017

Glacial time envelops Mohaiemen’s first fiction film, a sharp break from his decade of essay films on the 1970s left. A man follows a daily routine of walking, smoking, writing letters, staging scenes, and reading from a weathered copy of the dark British children’s classic Watership Down. Gradually, we learn that his home for the last decade is an abandoned airport. But is he a prisoner, or emperor of a vast domain? There are no guards and no visible fences, only a rusty jumbo jet, a magical supply of cigarettes, and a Boney M song about Babylon. The film was described by The New York Times as Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett mixed with Julio Cortázar, threaded through the needle of colonialism and 21st-century security states. (Martha Schwendener)

Tripoli Cancelled premiered at documenta 14 in Athens, and then was in the solo show There is No Last Man at Museum of Modern Art, New York. The film is staged in Athens’ Ellinikon terminal, designed by Eero Saarinen in 1969, and permanently closed in 2001 when a new airport was built for the Olympic Games. The airport was recently leased to an Arab-Chinese consortium for luxury real estate development, as part of EU bailout negotiations.

Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, installations, and essays to research Bangladesh histories– framed by World Socialism and Decolonization. Essays on the 1971 war that split Pakistan and created Bangladesh include Traitors, a Mutable Lexicon (Supercommunity, 2017), Simulation at Wars’ End, (Bioscope, 2016), Muhammad Ali’s Bangladesh Passport (New Inquiry, 2016), The Ginger Merchant of History (Witte de With, 2016), are just to name a few. In Bangladesh, his work has exhibited at Chobi Mela, Abdur Rajjak Bidyapith/Bengal Foundation, Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka Art Center and many more. In India, he had solo shows at Experimenter (Kolkata), exhibited at Kiran Nadar Museum (Noida), and gave talks at Sarai CSDS, Jadavpur University, Seagull Kolkata, Vidyashilp Academy, etc.

He edited Between Ashes and Hope: Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Drishtipat, 2010).

This programme is part of the Experimenter Curators’ Hub 2018.
BY INVITATION ONLY