The release of Muktir Gaan in 1995 ended a long, politically induced drought in films about the 1971 war that created Bangladesh. Built by Tareque and Catherine Masud from repurposed “found footage” shot by Lear Levin, the film was received by most Bangladeshi audiences as an exact documentary. The film crew’s explicit discussion of simulations and the inclusion of a “making of” section in the digital versatile disc (DVD) release a decade later have done little to change audience perceptions. This believing audience derives from a willing suspension of a skeptical eye, due to an absence of a moving image record of the war. The rewriting of story has been a crucial aspect of the documentation of, and debates around, national liberation wars. An initially declarative, and oral, culture around Bangladeshi war memories in the 1970s has been replaced by the search for evidence in the context of recent high stakes war crimes trials. What I want to suggest is that audiences have different modes of viewing specific to narratives that have become sacrosanct. They may be skeptical, rational, and evidentiary audiences for other objects, but with such sacred narratives they transform themselves, again, into a believing public.

In the late 1990s, there was much prognostication about the sub-computer future. It would put leapfrog theory into action, allowing developing economies to catch up with industrialized nations in one generation. But despite all the publicity and investment, usable sub-computers have not become the holy grail. Only the educated middle class has adopted them. The mass of people, especially in the rural and suburban regions of developing economies, have not. The issues extend beyond expense and availability, because no usable technology has been developed for these potential users. We often hear media-friendly examples, like the fisherman who checks the weather forecast on the web. While these stories amuse people at conferences and NGO forums, the truth is that such users are rare. Most of the applications on computers have little utility for a sub-literate mass population.CellBazaar began with a classroom observation that looked at this weakness and the corollary of opportunity. Simply put, the mobile phone has become the ubiquitous computing device in developing countries. The meteoric growth of mobile phone users in emerging economies has superseded all analyst predictions and future scenarios. The mobile phone has replaced the computer as the fastestgrowing technology. Allowing people almost everywhere to stay in touch with family, friends, and customers, and fulfilling myriad other needs, the mobile phone has become the essential technology. In countries like Bangladesh, the adoption curves have been astonishingly rapid, displaying classic "hockey stick" patterns. To take full advantage of this opportunity, we launched the mobile phone based market called CellBazaar in Bangladesh.

“A Questionnaire on Monuments” features 49 responses to questions formulated by Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty: “From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monuments and other markers involving histories of racial conflict. How do these charged situations shed light on the ethics of images in civil society today? Speaking generally or with specific examples in mind, please consider any of the following questions: What histories do these public symbols represent, what histories do they obscure, and what models of memory do they imply? How do they do this work, and how might they do it differently? What social and political forces are in play in their erection or dismantling? Should artists, writers, and art historians seek a new intersection of theory and praxis in the social struggles around such monuments and markers? How might these debates relate to the question of who is authorized to work with particular images and archives?”

This project comes out of a conversation between Mohaiemen and Pajović, about the relative absence of Non-Aligned Movement co-founder Josip Broz Tito, from the three-channel film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017, dir: Mohaiemen). In the film, a series of conversations between Vijay Prashad, Samia Zennadi, Atef Berredjem, Amirul Islam, and Zonayed Saki sketch out the shadow play of warring forces inside the Non-Aligned Movement, especially around the decolonizing nations of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia that found an option to look toward an "Islamic" supra-national identity. Because of that focus, the role of Central and Eastern Europe, especially that of Yugoslavia under Tito, is absent from the film. Pajović's text re-integrates the Yugoslav bloc into Two Meetings and a Funeral. While Pajović's text concludes with a hopeful view of the potential of the Non-Aligned Movement, Mohaiemen's images and superimposed quote from Tito express an ironic doubling back. Indira Gandhi's Indian coalition of 1971, while maneuvering for Bangladesh independence from Pakistan, encountered Tito's confident comment that such problems of “tribalism” were only happening in Asia. Yugoslavia had solved the “Balkan problem”– this was spoken confidently twenty years before Tito's nation would split apart during the Yugoslav Wars. The geopolitical struggles that Tito fails to see in 1971 are harbingers for the blind spots that would cause Non-Alignment's collapse.