TALKS
with Naeem Mohaiemen and Eszter Szakács
Fri 16 June 2023, 5 p.m.

 

5 p.m.: Eszter Szakacs, "An Arab World in Hungary"
6 p.m.: Naeem Mohaiemen, "Between Meetings"
7—8 p.m.: Discussion, followed by food & drinks

The anthology Solidarity Must Be Defended (edited by Eszter Szakács and Naeem Mohaiemen, tranzit.hu 2023) brings together projects on gestures and alignments within the visual arts around transnational solidarity during the Cold War. The book looks at both grand initiatives and tragic misfires from an entangled, decolonizing world, in dialogue with Mohaiemen’s film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017). Building on their experience of jointly editing the anthology, Szakács and Mohaiemen present two intertwined talks on their areas of research that braid into the ideas of the anthology. They look at case studies of misaligned solidarity gestures during the Cold War era and consider what each of these stories show us about the hope and risk of solidarity across borders, within the pressure of time and language. Szakács explores the vicissitudes of "Eastern Europe" and "Arab World" solidarity juncture points in Hungary, and Mohaiemen gleans the after-traces of French intellectual solidarity with Iran on the cusp of Islamic Revolution.

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Naeem Mohaiemen, Two Meetings and a Funeral, 2017