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Naeem Mohaiemen: Live True Life or Die Trying, 2009
The pictures and texts of the artist and writer living in Dhaka and in New York City give an introduction to the subject matter of the exhibition on a global level and bring up the present changes and developments in political communities as the author experienced them himself in Bangladesh. Naeem Mohaiemen took pictures of two rallies that accidentally took place the same day in Dhaka in early 2009. One was a demonstration of a leftist group of students at the end of which a bomb was burned in effigy, the other demonstration was organised by one of the many new Islamist groups calling for a withdrawal of Bangladesh UN peacekeeping forces from Irak. In his texts the artist argues that the fundamentalists who, years ago were mildly dismissed by the leftists, today operate with similarly sharp arguments and enemy stereotypes and are, in contrast to the leftists, much more popular and widely supported. Massive police presence at this demonstration indicates that the government, too, supports this movement. Mohaiemen describes how he, sympathising with the leftist student group, tries to support them by drawing attention to their actions in order to have them defy the intensity of the Islamist demonstration. He tries to stop and avert the looming failure of the history of the leftists and the subtle transformation to their counterparts by the means of his art. He succeeds in doing that, above all, by his essayistic strategy which is at the base of this photo installation, combining a documentary approach with subjectivity as well as poetry with theory to a contradictory amalgam that widens the gaps in geopolitics instead of decreasing them.
http://www.cueartfoundation.org/naeem-mohaiemen.html
http://www.shobak.org/
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