To Whom Have We Been Talking? Naeem Mohaiemen’s Fabulation of a People-to-Come

Abstract

This essay considers Naeem Mohaiemen’s three-channel video installation Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017) and performance-lecture The Shortest Speech (2019/2021) in order to expand the frameworks through which the Cold War might be understood from our contemporary perspective. It analyzes the technologies, techniques, and conventions of social assembly and public address embedded in and animating Mohaiemen’s works and makes visible the problematics of imagining a “people” during the Non-Aligned Movement’s historical context and in our neoliberal global capitalist present.

Keywords

• Cold War
• Non-Aligned Movement
• storytelling
• time-based media
• contemporary art