Writer and visual artist Naeem Mohaiemen has received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the “Creative Arts-Film-Video” category to work on the next chapter of his project The Young Man Was.
Since 2006, Naeem has worked on this project as a fragmentary history of the left in 1970s Bangladesh. One of the chapters is United Red Army, a film about the 1977 hijack of Japan Airlines that was flown to Dhaka. The film was shown widely in Bangladesh, and is in the collection of the Tate Modern museum.
The next chapter, the film Afsan’s Long Day (inspired by the work of journalist and historian Afsan Chowdhury), premiered this spring at Museum of Modern Art, New York. Naeem will work on the next chapter of this project through his Guggenheim Fellowship.
Naeem studied at Dhaka University, and then completed his B.A. degree at Oberlin College, USA, in 1993. Since 1994, he has worked in New York, and for extended periods in Dhaka, most recently from 2007-2011. He is also a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at Columbia University.
His visual work is a composite of film, photography, and mixed media, and is in the collection of the British Museum. Most recently, he created Shokol Choritro Kalponik, an imaginary newspaper from the year 2024, for the 2014 Dhaka Art Summit.
Naeem’s written research work includes a comprehensive critique of Sarmila Bose’s revisionist history book on 1971. His response essay has been widely cited and reprinted. He is the editor of Between Ashes and Hope: Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Drishtipat/Manusher Jonno Foundation).
Established in 1925, the Guggenheim Fellowships are “mid-career” awards given for scholarship in academia, or creativity in the arts. The fellowship is open to residents of the United States and Canada. This year, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded 177 fellowships to scholars, artists, and scientists. Fifty-six disciplines, 83 academic institutions, 29 US states and 2 Canadian provinces are represented by this year’s fellows.
Past South Asian Guggenheim Fellows in the Creative Arts category include the authors Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake), Rohinton Mistry (Fine Balance), Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss), Suketu Mehta (Maximum City) and Pico Iyer (Video Night in Kathmandu).
