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"For many who followed developments at and around Zuccotti Park last fall through Naeem Mohaiemen\u2019s prolific Facebook posts, his occasional asides \u2014 excerpted dialogue from the cult-hit 1990s teen drama  My So-Called Life ; the box-office performance of the latest installment of the  Harold &amp;amp; Kumar  franchise; a negative review of Steven Spielberg\u2019s recently released film  The Adventures of Tintin &amp;nbsp;\u2014 may have seemed out of character. But anyone acquainted with Mohaiemen or his work knows that he is a keen but somewhat perverse polymath, whose possible subjects of analysis run the gamut from newsworthy events of historical record to the sorts of minor cultural artifacts that constitute what the literary theorist Lauren Berlant has dubbed the \u201Csilly archive.\u201D Employing photography, video, and text \u2014 formats commonly used by the traditional news media \u2014 Mohaiemen, an artist, activist, and writer dually based in New York and Dhaka, Bangladesh, embeds painstaking archival research into a web of richly observed personal anecdotes and pop-culture references, presenting an idiosyncratically annotated narrative that enriches, complicates, and challenges dominant historical accounts.Take Mohaiemen\u2019s contribution to last year\u2019s Sharjah Biennial:  The Young Man Was (Part 1: United Red Army),  a 67-minute video about the September 28, 1977, hijacking of Japan Airlines Flight 472, en route from Paris to Tokyo to Dhaka, by a unit of the Japanese Red Army. The film is anchored and bracketed by Mohaiemen\u2019s personal memory of himself as a frustrated eight-year-old whose favorite TV show,  The Zoo Gang,  was superseded by a live broadcast of the hijacking-and-hostage crisis. An unprecedented media event for the young nation of Bangladesh, whose broadcast capabilities at the time were rudimentary at best, the airplane drama dragged on for days, a seeming eternity for the little boy awaiting the return of his beloved show.&amp;nbsp;While researching the project, Mohaiemen stumbled upon archival audio-recordings of the marathon radio negotiations between the hijackers\u2019 representative, code-named Dankesu, and the Bangladeshi hostage negotiator, Air Vice Marshall A. G. Mahmud, operating from the control tower. As might be expected, in the film, Mohaiemen intersperses excerpts from these recordings with snippets of archival video \u2014 blurry bits of the original black-and-white broadcast; Japanese, American, and local news coverage of the standoff; the wonderfully dated opening credits of  The Zoo Gang ; and a sequence from a film starring one of the airplane hostages, the actress Carole Wells \u2014 all held together by his measured voice-over, which fills in the broader historical and political context.Mohaiemen\u2019s treatment of the audio makes the film stand out. Fascinated by the deliberate, halting rhythm of the exchange between the two negotiators \u2014 the result, possibly, of the simple fact that English was the mother tongue of neither man \u2014 Mohaiemen chose to visualize what we hear as short phrases of colored text on the black screen. With Dankesu\u2019s words in red and Mahmud\u2019s in green, the echoing of sound through visual text gives the dialogue added weight. Unchallenged by image, subtle shifts in intonation, emotion, composure, and energy are amplified, as relations between the two men change during the course of the ordeal. Terse and businesslike at first, they soon become unexpectedly warm and cordial, a product of their forced intimacy. By the end, as the negotiations break down and the crisis reaches its climax, frustration and sheer exhaustion reduce Dankesu to a single-worded reticence and drive Mahmud to hysterical moments of voice-cracking desperation; he appears like a jilted lover trying to win back his beloved.After a tense standoff and interminable delays, the hijackers' demands \u2014 $6 million and the release of nine jailed comrades (only six agreed to go) \u2014 were met, the last time a government acquiesced to terrorists. But there is more to the story. The hijackers had headed to what they thought was an \u201Cindependent, Islamic, and popular\u201D Bangladesh, which would be sympathetic to their cause; they were unaware that a series of coups since its independence from Pakistan had resulted in a martial rather than a democratic government. And in the midst of the airplane-hostage crisis, a group of Bangladeshi officers attempted another, unsuccessful coup at the airport \u2014 with events unfolding before the hijackers and the hostages. On Mohaiemen\u2019s soundtrack, we hear Mahmud imploring Dankesu to shoot and kill the mutineers; Dankesu replies mechanically, with a euphemism that smacks of the strategic language of international diplomacy: \u201CI have understood that you have internal problems.\u201D And the hostages inadvertently witness and photograph the drama from inside the aircraft. While only 11 died on the tarmac, hundreds of suspected plotters were rounded up afterwards and summarily tried and executed, with far-reaching implications for Bangladeshi politics and history.&amp;nbsp;The film is a chapter in an ongoing multidisciplinary research project titled  The Young Man Was\u2026,  which Mohaiemen began in 2006. Excavating and dissecting the interwoven histories of failed leftist revolutionary movements of the 1970s \u2014 both in his native Bangladesh and around the world \u2014 Mohaiemen extracts episodes from their complicated trajectories as the tremendous promise of collective utopian aspirations gave way to exhaustion, misguided violence, and failed attempts at nation building. Rather than attempt a comprehensive account of the tumultuous decade, Mohaiemen\u2019s geographically expansive approach seeks universal lessons through specific case studies, in which he zooms in on particular figures and flash points. With a skepticism that tempers easy nostalgia for past idealist fervor, Mohaiemen examines the unintended consequences of adopting violent means to further a revolutionary cause: It enabled and justified equally violent counterrevolutionary responses, thereby consolidating the power of the Right. Finally, the extreme methods deployed by the radical Left were, Mohaiemen suggests, an \u201Caccidental Trojan horse\u201D that sabotaged the movement\u2019s broader ongoing struggles. &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;For an earlier chapter in the project,  I Have Killed Pharaoh,  2010, Mohaiemen investigated these ideas through the shadowy circumstances surrounding the downfall of Bangladesh\u2019s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Across three sets of paired text- and-image panels, more allusive than archival in tenor, Mohaiemen suggests that Mujibur\u2019s eventual assassination, in 1975, was inevitable, carefully planned, and not unexpected \u2014 an unintended consequence of his heavy-handed crackdown on ultraleftist guerillas who considered him too bourgeois, which distracted him from the rising tide of rightist Islamist sentiment in the army. Two accompanying sculptures address the assassination\u2019s collateral damage: With the exception of two daughters who happened to be abroad at the time, Mujibur\u2019s entire family was murdered; one of the spared daughters, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, went on to become prime minister and presided over the 2010 execution of the coup\u2019s plotters. Mohaiemen used expired Polaroid film to rephotograph images of the dead \u2014 Mujibur\u2019s innocent kin, and the men accused of orchestrating their assassination \u2014 from newspapers and then embedded the spectral images in blocks of clear resin. Rescued from oblivion and entombed for eternity, history\u2019s minor players become its lingering ghosts.An implicit theme running throughout these distinct chapters, and Mohaiemen\u2019s broader practice, is a reflection on the conditions of masculinity that shape these cultures of radicalism and, possibly, doom them to failure. In the text-and-image collage  Sartre kommt nach Stammheim &amp;nbsp;(Sartre Comes to Stammheim), 2007, the French existentialist philosopher\u2019s visit with the imprisoned Andreas Baader unfolds as an oedipal confrontation between two generations of the Left, in which the elder intellectual\u2019s solidarity is tested by the virile, reckless, and finally ineffectual idealism of youth. And in  Der Weisse Engel,  (The White Angel), 2011, Mohaiemen reflects on the idealized figure of the \u201CMuskel-Juden,\u201D the hypermasculine heroic Jew, playing out a cathartic revenge fantasy of delayed retribution for the genocide committed by the Pakistani Army during Bangladesh\u2019s 1971 war of liberation, through appropriated footage and dialogue from the 1976 film  Marathon Man,  in which Dustin Hoffman\u2019s Babe, a hapless history student studying for a Ph.D., an erstwhile stand-in for Mohaiemen, survives repeated torture and emerges victorious over Szell, a notorious Nazi war criminal played by Laurence Olivier.&amp;nbsp;This series of interlinked portraits of several men of action, both historical and fictional, reveals the personal and political stakes of Mohaiemen\u2019s research for the artist, himself a man of action. By taking stock of the various means deployed by these men and the intended and unintended consequences of their actions, Mohaiemen hopes to learn from the past, channeling his subjects\u2019 commitment to Leftist ideals into the progressive political struggles of the present, without repeating their many failures.&amp;nbsp;[content:advertisement-center]&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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