Naeem Mohaiemen: grace

As a caregiver to a family shaped by an uneven experience of migration (those who left, and those who stayed), Naeem Mohaiemen has experienced hospital bureaucracies in Dhaka, Delhi, and New York. While there have been many moments of precision, kindness, and guidance, there have also been experiences of isolation, mismanagement, and indecision. During one such interminable period, Atul Gawande’s book Complications (especially the chapter “Whose Life Is It Anyway?”), read in an ICU waiting room, began a process of thinking and feeling around this question: Is more extensive medical care always the science-driven boon we imagine, or can there be moments when families make the decision to decline medical care? What does it mean, in the end, to accept a body’s decline?

These questions are considered in recent works by Mohaiemen, a 2020–21 Lunder Institute senior fellow and the inaugural recipient of the Alfonso Ossorio Creative Production Grant. Naeem Mohaiemen: grace includes the film Jole Dobe Na (Bengali for “those who do not drown”) and grace, a new video based on conversations with Karen Wentworth, a longtime Maine resident Mohaiemen met while researching Maine’s newly ratified Death with Dignity Act.

grace, 2022
Mohaiemen’s Colby project evolved out of his conversations with Karen Wentworth (1956–2023), a Maine resident who registered her intent to use the provisions of the state’s 2019 Death with Dignity Act. While writing a book on cemeteries in 2003, Wentworth researched sustainable burial grounds and purchased a burial lot for herself in Maine. A stone placed on the lot gives her arrival date as 11-11-1956 and goodbye date as “infinity.” This exhibition features an arrangement of artworks from the Colby Museum’s collection, selected by Wentworth in conversation with Mohaiemen, and a new video based on the quiet routines of Wentworth’s life prior to her death on January 12, 2023. Wentworth lived her last days to the fullest: assembling a list of books she wanted to finish reading or read again; taking care of repairs to her home; spending time with friends, family, and a new grandchild; and enjoying the Maine summer and fall.

Jole Dobe Na, 2020 
film, 64 min, stereo
In the second film in his Abandoned series, Mohaiemen returns to themes of the family unit as a locus for pain-beauty dyads and the necessity of small fictions to keep living. The site is an empty hospital; a married couple spirals through medical routines, interspersed by readings from Syed Mujtaba Ali’s stories of cosmopolitan Europe between two wars.

In an empty hospital in Kolkata, a couple confront protocols of blood samples, a subtly Islamophobic office, regulations against bribery, and an abandoned operating theater. There are no doctors, signs of life, or residue of death. The husband’s mind is on a loop of the last weeks of his wife’s life, when a quiet argument developed between them. They were an estranged couple, thrown back into intimacy by an unknown epidemic. Even in an idealized dreamworld of his making, the overwhelming paranoia of infection is also the hesitant touch of intimacy.

The film’s title comes from the Bengali folk song:

Prophet Ayub fell in love
Rahima Bibi in love with he
Eighteen years a cursed life
But mother would not give up love
They who die in love never drown

প্রেম কইরাছে আইউব নবী
তার প্রেমে রহিমা বিবি গো
তারে আঠারো সাল কিরায় খাইলো আঠারো সাল
ও তারে আঠারো সাল কিরায় খাইলো তবুও প্রেম ছাড়লো না জননী
প্রেমের মরা জলে ডোবে না

Jole Dobe Na was co-commissioned by Yokohama Triennale (Japan), curated by Raqs Media Collective, and Bildmuseet at Umea (Sweden).