The Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University opened the United States premiere of Naeem Mohaiemen’s three-channel film “Through a Mirror, Darkly” on February 14, 2026. The film serves as the centerpiece of a broader exhibition titled “Corinthians,” curated by Rebecca Lowery, on view through May 24, 2026. An opening celebration was held February 13.

Mohaiemen’s work uses archival footage to examine the selective nature of historical memory, focusing on three events from May 1970. The film draws a direct comparison between the national attention given to the Kent State University shootings on May 4, 1970 — when four students were killed by Ohio National Guard troops — and the near-silence surrounding the Jackson State College shootings ten days later, when two students at a historically Black institution in Mississippi were killed by law enforcement. A third sequence examines labor and student dynamics near the World Trade Center construction site in New York City during the same period.

Mohaiemen draws the exhibition’s title from 1 Corinthians 13:12 and applies its image of imperfect, indirect vision to the fading memory of the Vietnam War era. The works of Robert Rauschenberg — screenprints from his 1970 “Surface Series (Currents)” — and documentation of Robert Smithson’s earthwork “Partially Buried Woodshed” (1970) accompany the film, framing it within contemporary artistic responses to the same historical moment. Critical response to the film has included Jonathan Jones of The Guardian calling it an illumination of why that era “haunts modern memory.”

The Wexner Center for the Arts is located at 1871 N. High St. on the Ohio State University campus in Columbus.

Source: Wexner Center for the Arts