United Red Army ( The Young Man Was, Part I) (2011, Naeem Mohaiemen)
United Red Army is a seventyminutelong video with sound that forms part of the artists series The Young Man Was 201116. This group of works is based on a researchled process in which Mohaiemen excavates historic and archival material looking for anecdotes and moments which illuminate an ongoing history of failures of radical left movements, or what he refers to as the ultraleft. Mohaiemen focuses on the history of his native Bangladesh, but highlights points of intersection or rupture between radical movements, annotating and destabilising received or established versions of their often incomplete histories. Reviewing the Sharjah Biennial in 2011, in which Mohaiemen showed work from this series, Kaelen Wilson Goldie wrote: Though broadly concerned with failed utopias, the project pursues a specific thesis: that the revolutionary movements of the 1970s gave the left an accidental Trojan horse by giving rise to a reactionary, counterrevolutionary right.
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