Éric Baudelaire and Naeem Mohaiemen

Éric Baudelaire is an artist and filmmaker based in Paris. After training as a political scientist, Baudelaire established himself as a visual artist with a research-based practice in several media ranging from printmaking, photography, and the moving image to installation, performance, and letter writing. His feature films have circulated widely in film festivals. When shown within exhibitions, the films are presented within broader installations that include curated projects with works in other media and extensive discursive programs. He was awarded the 2019 Marcel Duchamp prize, and published a monograph titled Make, Do, With with Paraguay Press in 2023.

Naeem Mohaiemen is a filmmaker and writer who combines photography, films, and essays to research the many forms of utopia-dystopia (families, borders, architecture, and uprisings) in the Muslim World after 1945. Despite underlining a historic tendency toward misrecognition of allies, the hope for a future international left, as an alternative to current silos of race and religion, is always a basis for the work. A throughline in all his work is family unit as locus for pain-beauty dyads, abandoned buildings as staging ground for lost souls, and the necessity of small prevarications to keep on living. Several conversations in contemporary art museums around the historic Non Aligned Movement and Third Worldism pivoted around the premiere of his three-channel film, Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), at documenta 14, Kassel. Historian Vijay Prashad (The Darker Nations, 2007) describes his work as having “the air of being unfinished because the history he is working on is unfinished.”