VIDEOTANK #34
Tripoli Cancelled
September 5 – October 4, 2025
Artist
Naeem Mohaiemen
Overview
Acclaimed as one of the must-see works of documenta 14, this is a haunting metaphorical take on the physical and mental isolation of the migrant experience. Inspired by the director’s father’s experience of being trapped in Greece’s Ellinikon Airport without a passport in 1977, the film follows a week in the life of a man who has been living in limbo at an airport for a decade. All promises of movement are ultimately met with stasis in this profound evocation of our epoch of desperate migration.
Artist
Naeem Mohaiemen was born in London, and grew up in Tripoli and Dhaka. He combines photography, films, and essays, to research borders, wars, and belonging within postcolonial markers. Since 2006, he has explored the 1970s revolutionary left in The Young Man Was, with protagonists who display misrecognition, sometimes becoming an “accidental trojan horse” carrying tragic results. Project chapters have shown at the Venice Biennale, Kunsthalle Basel, Dhaka Art Summit, Berlinale, Museum of Modern Art / New York, BFI London Film Festival, EVA (Ireland) Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, and the LUX/Independent Cinema Office initiative for artist films in mainstream UK cinema halls. He also publishes projects in print, most recently “Volume Eleven, flaw in the algorithm of cosmopolitanism” (South / documenta 14 journal), about his great uncle’s unfortunate admiration for the German military machine. Historian Afsan Chowdhury has bracketed Naeem with Nayanika Mukherjee, Bina D’Costa, Dina Siddiqi, and Yasmine Saikia as a “second wave of history writing” about Asia.
