Southward & Otherwise

Naeem Mohaiemen in collaboration with Uroš Pajović 
Southward & Otherwise
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2019

In 1971, when Indira Gandhi’s Indian diplomatic coalition was manoeuvring to secure Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan, it was confronted with Tito’s confident comment that such problems of “tribalism” only happened in Asia whereas Yugoslavia had already solved the “Balkan problem”. Twenty years later, in 1992, the Yugoslavian federation collapsed. The geopolitical struggles that Tito failed to see in 1971 are harbingers for the blind spots that would cause the collapse of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). 

In 2017, Naeem Mohaiemen made the three-channel film Two Meetings and a Funeral about the NAM. The Southward & Otherwise project is based on a conversation between him and Uroš Pajović on the absence of Josip Broz Tito, the NAM co-founder and former President of Yugoslavia, from the film. While Mohaiemen’s images and the superimposed quote from Tito express an ironic doubling back, Pajović’s text, based on his conversation with Mohaiemen and originally published in ARTMargins (1. 6. 2019), integrates the Yugoslavian bloc into the film and expresses hope about the potential of the NAM.