Tripoli Cancelled [2017]
film, 93 minutes, 2017
A man follows a daily routine of walking, smoking, writing letters, staging scenes, and reading from a weathered copy of Watership Down. Gradually, we learn that his prison for the last decade is an abandoned airport, and witness his slow descent into madness. Inspired by the experience of Mohaiemen’s father, trapped without a passport at Athens Ellinikon airport for nine days in 1977. In Mohaiemen’s first fiction film, the line between prisoner and king is blurred in a merging of our epoch of desperate migration with the post-Holocaust concept of “spectral human” (Hannah Arendt) and Der Muselmänner (Giorgio Agamben). The film is staged in the Ellinikon terminal designed by Eero Saarinen in 1969, closed in 2001 when the new Eleftherios Venizelos airport opened for the 2004 Olympic Games. The airport was recently used as a shelter for refugees, and then became one of the Greek state properties contracted in 2016 for real estate redevelopment.
KEY EXHIBITIONS:
New York, USA
post Presents: Unsettled Dust- Archives, Epistemologies, Images, Screening: Tripoli Canceled, MoMA NY 2023
“There is no Last Man,” curated by Peter Eleey, MoMA NY, 2018
Queensland, Australia
Contemporary Art X Cinema, 2023
Ontario, Canada
Carleton University, 2022
Wellington, New Zealand
“Optimism & Afterlives”, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, 2021 [PDF] [Publication PDF]
Munich, Germany
Kino Der Kunst, 2020
Singapore
“Non Aligned,” Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary Arts, 2020
Dubai
Jameel Arts Centre, 2019
Kolkata, India
Experimenter Curator’s Hub 2018, Goethe-Institut, 2018
“I wish to let you fall out of my hands,” with Bani Abidi, Experimenter Gallery, 2018
Basel, Switzerland
Bildrausch Filmfest Basel, 2018
Torino, Italy
Torino Film Festival, 2017
Beirut, Lebanon
Sharjah Biennial 13: Act II, curated by Reem Fadda and Hicham Khalidi, 2017
Athens, Greece
documenta 14 (curated by Adam Szymczyk), 2017 [catalogue text]
“What We Found After You Left,” exhibition of Greek photography inspired by Tripoli Cancelled, 2017. (curated by Naeem Mohaiemen)
Lisbon, Portugal
Doc Lisboa, International Festival Premiere, In Competition, 2017
London, UK
BFI London Film Festival, curated by Ben Cook, 2017
PRESS
The New York Times, “Mohaiemen’s fictional version of the tale is magically existential — like Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett mixed with Julio Cortázar, threaded through the needle of colonialism and 21st-century security states…[H]e aptly shows not just how the personal is always entwined with the political, but how history veers from neat linear narratives into circular, concentric and even fantastic and unimaginable patterns and designs.” (Martha Schwendener, 2018)
Film Explorer, “[T]here is a peculiar movement of abstraction in Tripoli Cancelled, where concrete topics
like the no man’s land of refugees and the bureaucratic filing of human beings transcend into a
suspension of time and place that is expressed through the metaphysical power of photography.” (Giuseppe Di Salvatore, 2018)
Millenium Film Journal, “Stopping short of answering large questions, the work flirts productively with political reckonings, entanglements of cultural identity and the ethical choices that shape our humanity.” (Rachel Stevens, 2018)
The Wire, ”The work has absolute disregard for time as a meter, often using it malleably as though his unnamed protagonist and his derelict set were living in an alternate dimension.” (Maria D’Souza, 2018)