Naeem Mohaiemen / Two Meetings and a Funeral

In the video work Two Meetings and a Funeral, Naeem Mohaiemen takes us back to the global political events of the 1960s and 1970s. The work focuses on the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), in which formerly colonized countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America came together to devise a union to rival the Soviet Union and the Western Bloc. The focal point of the film is the relationship between the Non-Aligned Movement, Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the birth of the nation state of Bangladesh.

Architecture is one of the main protagonists in this work that takes us to the actual sites and buildings in Algiers, Lahore, Dhaka, and New York that housed the meetings and pivotal political shapeshifters of the Non-Aligned Movement. The film traces the trails of people and events that were instrumental for the historical outcome. Two Meetings and a Funeral was commissioned for documenta 14, 2017.

Naeem Mohaiemen (b. 1969, London) lives and works in New York. In films, installations, drawings and essays he investigates legacies of socialist utopias, incomplete decolonisation, and how shifting borders, citizenship and language wars shape people’s lives. Mohaiemen has presented his work extensively at exhibitions and film festivals around the world. He was a finalist for the Turner Prize in 2018.