Naeem Mohaiemen: Corinthians

Evoking scripture, morality, ancient city-states, and the distance created by time, Corinthians explores the act of seeing a past event through trauma, time, and memory. It implies moral bewilderment without naming guilt or heroism.

Mohaiemen’s Through a Mirror, Darkly (2025) is at the center of the exhibition. The film, produced by UK arts organization Artangel and commissioned in partnership with the Wexner Center and Film and Video Umbrella, weaves together footage from three crisis moments of May 1970. It uses three separate screens to choreograph a visual relationship of debate, friction, and disagreement between archival footage and contemporary ceremonies in Ohio, Mississippi, and New York to explore the role of memorials as a focal point for individual remembering and collective forgetting.

The film contrasts the memorialization of the Kent State University events on May 4 in Ohio, where four students were killed, with the silence around the shootings at Jackson State College, a historically Black college in Mississippi, where two students were killed on May 14. The film also examines a moment of misrecognition between blue-collar labor and students in New York City against the backdrop of the under-construction World Trade Center.

The installation of Through a Mirror, Darkly is situated alongside rarely seen works from regional institutions’ collections, chosen by Mohaiemen and Wex curators to broaden the vision of the era’s intermingled conflict, inequity, violence, and patriotism.* These include work by Elijah Pierce; Benny Andrews’s Mother and Country, from the Bicentennial Series; Robert Rauschenberg’s Surface Series from Currents (1970); documentation of Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970); and Chris Burden’s Through the Night Softly (1973). Works by Saul Steinberg and others will also be on loan from the Columbus Museum of Art.

Exploring period artwork and engaging with the film’s unfolding discussion invites visitors to reflect on how, as Mohaiemen describes it, “the farther away we get in years, the more hazy the many meanings of events in the mirror of memory become.”

* The artist and curator note that artists who are women and people of color are underrepresented, which reflects certain blind spots of the contemporary art scene of that time.