Asia Art Archive in America is proud to announce artist, author, and educator Naeem Mohaiemen as the Fall 2023 AAA-A Artist-in-Residence. We will support the artist to engage in the research, development, and/or execution of a new creative work, responding to AAA-A’s digital and physical archive and collection. The three-month residency will culminate in a public presentation to share the findings and result of the artist’s research. 

The Residency program aims to catalyze new ideas through invited artists and their engagement with the collections we hold, the ideas that shape us, and the sites we inhabit. Held in the Fall and again in the Spring, the Residency will host one artist per session for a period of 3 months. Throughout both sessions, each selected artist will have dedicated access to the collection and the opportunity to research the wide range of material available at our reading room, which comprises over 5,000 titles about contemporary art from and of Asia, including art and writing by Asian Americans and the diaspora. This residency will also offer full access to over 82,000 digitized records of primary source material from Asia Art Archive’s research collection. The available collections span a range of monographs, exhibition catalogs, reference books, periodicals, and audio-visual materials, in addition to digitized photographs, letters, and other ephemera. 

Artists will be invited to explore any aspect of the reading room collection or digital archive, including but not limited to its content, priorities, and even its organizational structure, while utilizing AAAinA’s staff as thought partners. The residency will also foster connections and collaborative exchanges with our community through individualized introductions and public programming. With this residency, we hope our collections will offer Residents opportunities for research, reflection and inspiration. 

Naeem Mohaiemen

Naeem Mohaiemen combines photography, films, and essays to research forms of utopia-dystopia after 1945. He is author of Midnight’s Third Child (Dhaka: Nokta / University of Liberal Arts, 2023) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); editor of Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Dhaka: Drishtipat, 2010); and co-editor with Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must be Defended (Budapest: Tranzit / University of Budapest, 2023) and with Lorenzo Fusi of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sienna: Sylvana, 2007). Monographs on his artist projects include What We Found After You Left (Toronto: Power Plant, 2021).

AAA-A Artist-in-Residence program is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.