Eszter Szakács + Naeem Mohaiemen
The anthology Solidarity Must Be Defended brings together projects on gestures and alignments within the visual arts around transnational solidarity during the Cold War. In dialogue with, among others, the quietist tendencies of non-alignment and the radical vector of liberation movements, the book looks at both grand initiatives and tragic misfires from an entangled, decolonizing world. The point of departure for this anthology is a special issue of Mezosfera magazine (“Refractions of Socialist Solidarity”) edited in Budapest by Szakács in dialogue with Mohaiemen’s three-channel film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017).  This anthology proposes that transnational solidarity is always worth celebrating, but also extremely difficult to inhabit.

Publication date: August 2020 

Publishers: tranzit.hu (Budapest) – Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) – SALT (Istanbul) — Tricontinental (New Delhi) – Asia Culture Center (Gwangju)

Eszter Szakács is a curator, editor, and researcher in Budapest. She works at the contemporary art organization tranzit.hu in Budapest since 2011. At tranzit.hu she is co-editor of the online international art magazine Mezosfera, co-editor of the book IMAGINATION/IDEA: The Beginning of Hungarian Conceptual Art—The László Beke Collection, 1971 (Budapest, Zurich: tranzit.hu, JRP|Ringier, 2014), and she curated the collaborative research project Curatorial Dictionary. In 2018, she organized at tranzit.hu the Hungarian premiere of Two Meetings and a Funeral (Mohaiemen 2017). She is a curatorial team member of the civil initiative OFF-Biennale Budapest. Her practice revolves around questions of internationalisms, methods of cultural resistance, relations between Eastern Europe and the Global South, as well as the exhibitionary form of research.

Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, installations, and essays to research former utopias– framed by Third World Internationalism and World Socialism. Despite underlining a left tendency toward misrecognition of allies, a hope for a future international left, as an alternative to current polarities of race and religion, is a basis for the work. Power Plant Center for Contemporary Arts in Toronto is hosting an exhibition of his films, What We Found After You Left (Chapter I-IV) until August 2020. Naeem’s previous Canadian solo exhibition was at VOX — Centre de l'image contemporaine in Montreal (2016) and he premiered films at Gallery TPW (2014), Hot Docs (2012), Images Festival at Aspace Gallery (2012), and SAVAC, the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (2007).