mohaiemen

Part of Museum as Hub New Museum, New York In the early ’90s, curators at the New Museum organized three related exhibitions that critically examined the rhetoric of colonial expansion and conquest. Developed under the working title “Occupied Territory,” these exhibitions— “In Transit,” “The Final Frontier,” and “Trade Routes” —invited artists to respond to questions surrounding globalization’s social, economic, cultural, and intellectual exchanges. To address these issues in a renewed context, Laura Kurgan and Naeem Mohaiemen will engage the original overarching conceptual framework for the three exhibitions through presentations that draw upon their current research and individual practices. They will both respond as if the “Occupied Territory” outline—sourced from an internal working document in the New Museum archives—were a structural prompt they had received for an exhibition series today. Against this exhibition history, presentations by Kurgan and Mohaiemen will open up a conversation that will draw out and reassess ideas about the changing borders and boundaries of culture in relation to issues as wide-reaching as neoliberal capitalism and as particular as the situations facing individual cities. In 1993, Kurgan talked about trade routes as the movement of people, things, and money around the globe—each of which move at different speeds. Discussing her contribution to the original exhibition “Trade Routes,” a project that set a direction for recurring themes in her practice, she will touch upon the conceptual framework as it was laid out over twenty years ago. Kurgan’s work fluctuates between thematic mapping and data visualization in artistic, aesthetic, and political contexts. For “Plotting Movements,” Kurgan will show recent work involving the mapping of oil shipping globally, the mapping of political, economic, and environmental causes for global migration, and the migration to and from prison in many US cities, among other projects. Mohaiemen will tell the story of Talpatti, an island that emerged in the Bay of Bengal after the Bhola cyclone of 1970, and was discovered by an American satellite in 1974. The island became the location for a contentious battle of “ownership” between India and Bangladesh. This territory dispute allowed the post-1975 regime in Bangladesh to take on a saber-rattling position against India, drawing a sharp contrast (“a line in the water”) with the earlier “friendship policy” that had originated from the Indian support of the Bengali guerrilla army during the 1971 war that split Pakistan and created Bangladesh.