Dreams Watch Each Other [2022]
Naeem Mohaiemen
Al-ahlām turāqib l'un l'autre attentivement (2022)
Billboards in locations across Tunis
Commissioned by Jaou Tunis
Naeem Mohaiemen works on transnational left politics in the Muslim world after the Second World War. His research, both as an artist and as Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University, New York, examines the entangled histories of Marxist-influenced uprisings, revealing the unstable nature of transnational alliances. His works question fixed borders and imagine, against experience, a future collective, socialist utopia that unites people across the lines of race, religion, and nationality.
Commissioned by Jaou Tunis, his work Al-ahlām turāqib l'un l'autre attentivement (2022) consists of three billboard images. In continuation of his interest in the possibilities of creolized language, Mohaiemen has created a hybrid Arabic-French phrase Al-ahlām turāqib l'un l'autre attentivement on these images that resemble commercial advertisements. If we let go of grammar rules, and read from left to center, pause, and then from right to center, they may mean: “dreams look at each other closely.” The gender in Arabic (“masculine”) and in French (“feminine”) merges into what, in the third language of Bengali, is called “Klib Linga” (in-between gender, or beyond gender). The color gradients may be flags melting into each other, or a designer's flourish. A passenger walks toward fire, the film slides await cleaning, and the light switch is at half attention.
“Dreams watch each other narrowly,” a remark left by a poet who visited Mohaiemen’s first solo exhibition in Dhaka in 2008, rattled around in his head, and rose repeatedly at multiple conjunctures over the next fourteen years. At first, Mohaiemen had thought these were the poet's own stanza, translated into Bengali. Only later did he understand they were lyrics to a Jim Morrison spoken word poem “Angels and Sailors”, recorded seven years after his death by the remaining members of the band for the album An American Prayer (1978).
These words resonated when a microscopic contingent at Dhaka University, Bangladesh, organized a “where is my vote” rally in support of Iran’s Green Movement the next year. They reached a fever pitch when the world was transfixed by Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, and then crushed by what Vijay Prashad called a reversal that can be understood through this metaphor: “Arab Spring, Libyan Winter”. Events cycled as tragedy when Occupy Wall Street in New York wanted to send a delegation to Tahrir Square and were told their presence would only amplify the banal accusation of “external forces”, routinely used to delegitimize people’s uprisings in the Islamicate world.
“Dreams watch each other closely”–these words are a testament to the perpetual human longing to believe in a force of liberation, in spite of and against disappointment. From Thich Quang Duc to Kalpana Chakma, from Mohamed Bouazizi to Pritilata Waddedar, from Mahsa Amini to Steve Biko–individual names become signifiers. They are witness to the idea that we receive energy and hope precisely from movements outside our own borders, because they remind us that freedom dreams are transnational and perpetual.
Thanks: Karim Sultan, Hiba Abid, Safy Eldin Ahmed, Sumeja Tulic.