Solidarity in Time: Film Screening & Public Event / J.Vesic & N. Mohaiemen

The series examines how leftist uprisings of the 1970s became, in their failures, what Mohaiemen calls “accidental trojan horse.” Archival footage is reappropriated from Mother Teresa (1970s), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and Deutschland im Herbst (1978), and remixed with leftist historian Afsan Chowdhury’s diaristic account of the 1970s. Fear of the “red horse” in 1970s Bangladesh collidescollide with an account of Jean Paul Sartre’s meeting with Andreas Baader in the midst of the German Autumn. These linkages are not linear history, but rather Mohaiemen’s insistence on the possibility of the “pages of an exploded history book” (Prisoners of Shothik Itihash, curated by Adam Szymczyk, Kunsthalle Basel, 2014). In this project, he continues to ask what it means to be an accidental witness to the temptations of modernity arrayed against dreams of emancipation.