Until April 23, 2023, the Davis Gallery of Colby College’s Museum of Art is presenting Associate Professor of Visual Arts Naeem Mohaiemen’s interdisciplinary show, Grace, which consists of a collaborative curation and screenings of two films: Grace (2022) and Jole Dobe Na (2020).
From 2020 to 2021, Mohaiemen served as a senior fellow at Colby College’s Lunder Institute, where he was the inaugural recipient of the Alfonso Ossorio Creative Production Grant.
With the help of two research assistants at Colby College, (Sam Scott and Yan Xuan), Mohaiemen also began working with Maine resident Karen Wentworth (1956-2023) to explore questions of longevity, dignity, and grace in light of her terminal cancer diagnosis. Wentworth, whose ties to the Columbia University community include her work with the Covenant House in New York City, had opted to utilize Maine’s Death with Dignity Act.
The result of Mohaiemen and Wentworth’s collaboration includes a co-curated exhibition of pieces from Colby College Museum of Art’s permanent collection and Grace, a forty-eight minute video that encompasses parts of Wentworth’s life story, her process of selecting pieces to be displayed during the present exhibition, and Mohaiemen’s recollections of his time caring for his father during the last stages of his life.
Alongside Grace, the exhibition also includes a screening of Mohaiemen’s Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown in Bengali), a sixty-four minute long film set in an abandoned Kolkata hospital, where a husband confronts the psychological repercussions of his wife’s last days amidst medical bureaucracy, the residue of socio-political events, and dizzying loss. The film was commissioned by the 2020 Yokohama Triennale and Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden.
These two films live in conversation with one another, each addressing topics that are difficult and universal. The exhibition, however, is considerate, daring, and profoundly earnest. More than exhibiting work, Mohaiemen’s approach in Grace takes a turn toward art-spurred discourse.
Naeem Mohaiemen was born in London in 1969, and grew up in Tripoli, Libya, and Dhaka, Bangladesh. He combines photography, films, archives, and essays to research the many forms of utopia-dystopia (families, borders, architecture, and uprisings). He holds a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University, where he is Associate Professor of Visual Arts. Mohaiemen’s work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, Tate Modern, MACBA, Van Abbemuseum, Art Institute of Chicago, Sharjah Art Foundation, Singapore Art Museum, and Kiran Nadar Museum.
