Resources

A slowly growing library of commissioned texts, and online resources on artists’ moving image in Bangladesh.

Commissioned  Essays

Moving Image Matters by Parsa Sanjana Sajid 2026

Eye(II), 2024 By Zihan Karim; Loop Video With Audio, 11.00 Min; Photo © Artist

The essay considers the evolving landscape of moving image and visual culture with critical attention to perspective, technique, form, narrative and their relation to pedagogical, institutional and material infrastructures or lack thereof in Bangladesh. Drawing from a heterogeneous catalog of references and visual rituals, moving images straddle experimentation and hyperrealism, speculation and commentary. Although these threads are present among Bangladeshi artists, I also inquire whether a vernacular of novelty and nostalgia (one which primarily relies on sentimental affect of moral approval) emerges in their work. Instead of a survey, the essay aims to understand a. the systemic bases of moving image practice (e.g., with particular attention to the Chittagong Faculty of Fine Arts), and b. the subtexts of visual vocabulary arising therein.

Reading online

Contemporary art and the living film archive in Bangladesh. Lotte Hoek, Third Text Online, 2023. Hoek argues that the film societies of Bangladesh amount to a living archive, and that contemporary artists draw their forms, habits and politics from it, often without saying so. Munem Wasif, Dilara Begum Jolly and the Uronto residencies all pass through.
http://www.thirdtext.org/livingarchives-hoek

Pictures on paper. Lotte Hoek, Terrain, 2019. On the Bangladesh Film Club Act and the censoring of cinematic culture by paperwork rather than scissors. 
https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/19361?lang=en#text

Bangladeshi art in the 1990s, Ziaul Karim. Asia Art Archive, Like a Fever. The decade when the boundary of painting was redrawn to admit photography, film and video, told from inside. 
https://aaa.org.hk/en/like-a-fever/like-a-fever/bangladeshi-art-in-the-1990s/type/essays

The film and I. Ritwik Ghatak, 1963, republished by e-flux Notes, 2026. Written as Ghatak prepared to leave Calcutta for Bombay, a short credo on why he made films the way he did, impatient with film theory and commercial convention in roughly equal measure. 
https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783480/the-film-and-i

Naeem Mohaiemen by Adam Szymczyk. BOMB, March 2026. On Through a Mirror, Darkly and A Missing Can of Film, with a long exchange about archival tempo, why the contemporary footage holds shots where nothing happens. The most current substantial interview with him online. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2026/03/16/naeem-mohaiemen-by-adam-szymczyk/

New artist focus: Sarinah Masukor on Naeem Mohaiemen. LUX, 2016. A commissioned text on The Young Man Was series, written from within the UK artists' moving image context. 
https://lux.org.uk/new-artist-focus-sarinah-masukor-naeem-mohaiemen/

Sharing is transgressing: piracy, film societies and independent filmmaking in Dhaka, Imran Firdaus. Senses of Cinema, 2023. From the journal's issue on cinema and piracy, and it argues that pirated VHS, DVDs and torrents did more to build cinephilia in Dhaka than any official channel, feeding the film societies, the Short Film Forum lineage and eventually the festival successes of the 2000s. https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2023/cinema-and-piracy/sharing-is-transgressing-piracy-film-societies-and-independent-filmmaking-in-dhaka/

Naeem Mohaiemen’s writing for The Daily Star, Bangladesh’s English language newspaper
https://www.thedailystar.net/author/naeem-mohaiemen

Books

Midnight's third child. Naeem Mohaiemen, Nokta, Dhaka. The book this project takes its name from.

Cut-pieces: celluloid obscenity and popular cinema in Bangladesh. Lotte Hoek, Columbia University Press, 2014. An ethnography of the illegal sexually explicit celluloid spliced into action films, and along the way the best account in English of how films are actually made, screened and unmade in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh cinema and national identity. Zakir Hossain Raju, Routledge, 2014. The first full academic history of the national cinema, framed around the question of which publics it served.

Identity, nationhood and Bangladesh independent cinema. Fahmidul Haq and Brian Shoesmith, Routledge. On the independent and short film movement from the 1980s onward

Forms of the left in postcolonial South Asia. Sanjukta Sunderason and Lotte Hoek, eds, Bloomsbury, 2021. Essays on aesthetics and left politics across the region.

Film in Bangladesh. Alamgir Kabir, Bangla Academy, Dhaka, 1979. Long out of print and not online. Listed anyway, because it is the founding text of film criticism in the country

Watching and listening

Naeem Mohaiemen works on Vimeo On Demand

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/naeemmohaiemen/