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Paper short abstract

Naeem Mohaiemen’s films explore memory, loss, and failed revolutions through multimodal forms. Blending archive, fiction, and installation, his work creates counter-archives that challenge linear history and offer new modes of visual-anthropological inquiry.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the multimodal film and installation projects of Naeem Mohaiemen as critical interventions in visual anthropology and postcolonial historiography. Through works such as United Red Army (2011), Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), and Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown) (2020), Mohaiemen engages with the fragmented legacies of decolonization, leftist internationalism, and personal mourning. His practice—spanning film, photography, installation, and textual narration—constitutes a complex archive of memory that destabilizes linear historiography and foregrounds the affective resonances of loss.

Drawing on multisensory engagement and non-linear narratives, Mohaiemen’s work operates as a multimodal excavation of revolutionary aspirations that faltered under the weight of geopolitical realignments and ideological disillusionment. His films blend archival footage, constructed scenes, voiceover, and spatial installation to create environments where memory becomes a contested terrain, simultaneously personal and collective. This paper situates Mohaiemen’s aesthetic strategies alongside critical debates in anthropology about visual representation, participatory archives, and the politics of absence, highlighting how his work stages a counter-archive that resists closure and invites spectators into a space of reflective witnessing.

Mohaiemen’s use of temporality—marked by repetitions, stillness, and fractured narratives—evokes the liminality of memory work in postcolonial contexts. His focus on liminal spaces mirrors the anthropological exploration of how environments become repositories of loss and resistance. Through this lens, Mohaiemen’s practice emerges not merely as a documentation of history but as a visual and sonic ethnography of dislocation, offering new modes of engaging with the entanglements of memory, revolutionary pasts, and the unfinished work of mourning.