The Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University is presenting the United States premiere of Naeem Mohaiemen’s three-channel film “Through a Mirror, Darkly,” as part of an exhibition titled “Corinthians,” open through May 24, 2026. The film was commissioned by the Wexner Center in partnership with Artangel and Film and Video Umbrella and curated by Wexner Center Curator of Exhibitions Rebecca Lowery.

The work examines three crisis moments from May 1970. It contrasts the memorialization of the Kent State University shootings on May 4—where four students were killed by National Guard troops—with the comparatively overlooked shooting of two students at Jackson State College in Mississippi ten days later. A third strand considers a confrontation between blue-collar workers and student demonstrators in New York, filmed against the backdrop of the under-construction World Trade Center. Mohaiemen describes the work as considering “the memorialization of the Vietnam War era, and how the farther away we get in years, the more hazy the many meanings of events in the mirror of memory become.”

The broader Corinthians exhibition incorporates works selected by Mohaiemen and Wex curators from Ohio State University’s permanent collection and the Columbus Museum of Art, including Robert Rauschenberg’s 1970 Surface Series screenprints and documentation of Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed. After its Columbus run, the film travels to venues in Nottingham, Glasgow, and Southampton. Related programming included a reading by cartoonist Derf Backderf, author of Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, on March 10, and a conversation between Mohaiemen and artist Vincent Meessen on March 27.

Source: Wexner Center for the Arts