Naeem Mohaiemen: It is Not Necessary to Understand Everything / Trevor Paglen: Autonomy Cube / Emily Fahlén & Ahmet Öğüt: Same Time Next Day

Naeem Mohaiemen: It is Not Necessary to Understand Everything
As part of The Eros Effect: Art, Solidarity Movements and the Struggle for Social Justice

Naeem Mohaiemen’s exhibition, It is Not Necessary to Understand Everything, centers around United Red Army (The Young Man Was, Part I), a film which departs from the 1977 hijacking of Japan Airlines flight 472, when the plane was forced to land in Bangladesh. The hostage negotiation audio tapes manifest as black frames with color-coded subtitles, while two distinct voices, a hijacker and a commander, struggle for control. News footage of released hostages, the tarmac at standstill, and the simultaneous “German autumn” are the interstitials for a story told mostly in darkness. A timeline of a decade of hijacking that peaked in 1977 and a Bangla magazine’s censored coverage complement the film. Mohaiemen’s project, The Young Man Was (2006–15), probes the 1970s as a period of security panic in response to the ultra-left, providing a foil to today’s era of deterritorialized violence. Special thanks to Experimenter and LUX.

Autonomy Cube 
by Trevor Paglen
This minimalist-looking sculpture is intended to be placed in art institutions, galleries, and other public spaces, and provides a secure Wi-Fi network to visitors. Made in collaboration with digital civil liberties activist, computer security researcher, and artist Jacob Appelbaum, it consists of a Plexiglas cube containing two interconnected circuit boards, placed on a pedestal. The sculpture functions by latching onto the host site’s Wi-Fi, rerouting the user’s traffic to Tor, a global network run by relay volunteers which, through their systems, successively bounce communications, making users’ precise information virtually untraceable. It is maintained by thousands of volunteer-run servers and is used by many people around the world to protect their privacy. Paglen’s piece plays with notions of autonomy in art history, proposing the need to keep art spaces as civic infrastructures autonomous of data surveillance. Artist presentation by Trevor Paglen on Saturday, March 25, 2pm.

Emily Fahlén & Ahmet Öğüt: Same Time Next Day 

As part of Tensta Museum Continues

By exploring the notion of chronic temporality in Tensta, this film reveals continuities and repetitions, and ongoing processes that lack defined beginnings and ends. It does this by considering the daily routines of the founder of a news network for the Eritrean diaspora, the industrious enthusiast behind a local women’s association, and the most famous poet of Kurdistan who smokes every waking hour.

A course in the histories and politics of migration featuring Petra Bauer, Peo Hansen, Stefan Jonsson, Shahram Khosravi, and Mahmoud Keshavarz will begin February 8 with meetings held twice a month. In collaboration with Södertörn University; Stockholm University; REMESO – Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society at Linköping University; Royal Institute of Art; and Malmö University. Also part of the Eros Effect, Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri’s project Excavating International Solidarity: Artist Actions, Museography and Exhibition Histories is a three day symposium—February 17–19—consisting of student workshops, a public presentation on Khouri and Salti’s research on Museum’s in exile, and a witness seminar inviting participants involved in art actions and solidarity movements related to Chile and Palestine in the 1970s. Parts of their ongoing research on the 1978 International Art Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine, as well as new material on Sweden’s contribution to Chile’s Allende Museum, will be displayed in the Classroom. The seminar series What Does an Archive Do? continues, looking into current functions of archives in relation to contemporary art and beyond. With Ute Meta Bauer, Dagmar Brunow, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, and Alisa Lebow.