This event will be held in English.
Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
Presenting two of his films, Those Who Do Not Drown and Grace, Reid Hall Faculty Visitor Naeem Mohaiemen will consider the question: When is the end of pharma-medical care, and whose life is it anyway?
Mohaiemen will screen Those Who Do Not Drown (64') in full and show excerpts from Grace.
Films
Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown) (2020) is a response to a prompt from Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective to reflect on modes of care and the afterlife of caregivers. Set in an empty hospital in Kolkata, the film follows a man facing protocols of blood, a subtly discriminatory office, and a vacant operating theater.
During his Lunder Institute for American Art Senior Research Fellowship, Mohaiemen learned of the state of Maine’s 2019 Death with Dignity Act. He contacted Karen Wentworth (1956 - 2023), the second person in the state to legally secure medicine for a dignified end of life process. In 2018, Karen received a terminal cancer diagnosis, which she approached with a seeker’s curiosity. A reflection on Karen's life and the acceptance of the body's decline, the film Grace (2022) documents Naeem and Grace's collaboration – meetings, correspondence, conversations, and their friendship. On January 12th, 2023, Karen said goodbye at a time of her choosing. A banyan sapling was planted in her memory at the Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute in Kolkata.
Speaker
Naeem Mohaiemen, Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Head of the Photography Concentration at the Department of Visual Arts, Columbia University, is a filmmaker and writer who combines films, photography, drawings, and essays to research forms of utopia-dystopia slippage (families, borders, architecture, and uprisings) in the Muslim World after 1945.
Venue
For nearly 60 years, Columbia University students and faculty have come to study, teach, and pursue their research at Reid Hall, home to Columbia Global Centers | Paris. Nestled in the Montparnasse district, Reid Hall also hosts several other Columbia University initiatives: Columbia Undergraduate Programs, M.A. in History and Literature, GSAPP Shape of Two Cities Program, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination. This unique combination of resources is enhanced by our global network whose mission is to expand the University's engagement the world over through educational programs, research initiatives, regional partnerships, and public events.
Through its public events, Columbia Global Centers | Paris addresses pressing global issues that are at the forefront of international education and research: agency and gender; climate and the environment; critical dialogues for just societies; encounters in the arts; and health and medical science.
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The views and opinions expressed by speakers and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of Columbia Global Centers | Paris or its affiliates.
