Naeem Mohaiemen’s Through a Mirror, Darkly Makes US Debut at the Wexner Center for the Arts

Opening February 14, 2026, acclaimed artist Naeem Mohaiemen’s three-channel film Through a Mirror, Darkly makes its US debut at the Wexner Center for the Arts as part of the exhibition Corinthians. The exhibition also includes a group of related works Mohaiemen and Wex curators have selected from The Ohio State University’s permanent art collection (stewarded by the Wex) as well as works from Columbus Museum of Art. The exhibition runs through May 24, 2026.

Evoking scripture, morality, ancient Greece, 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. While the familiar reference for the title is a book in the Bible, the second reference is to the people of Corinth, the Greek city that was simultaneously a model for cosmopolitanism and sometimes a warning against adrift morality. We are visited here by the specter of a ruined society, where grandeur has eroded and idealism turned to dust. At heart there is a tragic continuity: civilizations rise, destroy themselves, and then forget the past to begin again.

With Through a Mirror, Darkly at its center, the exhibition centers these concerns by incorporating footage from three major crisis moments from May 1970. By using three channels to choreograph a visual relationship of debate, friction, and disagreement between archival footage and contemporary ceremonies in Ohio, Mississippi, and New York, Through a Mirror, Darkly explores the role of memorials as a focal point for individual remembering and collective forgetting. 

The film contrasts the memorialization of events at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4th, in which four students were killed, with the silence around the fatal shooting of two students at Jackson State College, a historically Black college in Mississippi, just 10 days later. The film also examines a moment of misrecognition between blue-collar labor and idealistic students in a New York tableau with the under-construction World Trade Center in the backdrop. 

Reviewing the film in the Guardian, art critic Jonathan Jones writes that it shows why that era “haunts modern memory – in a more intimate way than Ken Burns.” In a cover story for England’s Art Review, Oliver Basciano describes a “correspondingly hypnotic quality, in which shots are taken from unobtrusive angles, pauses in interviews remain in the edit and the archive footage feels degraded and aged by the fog of time.” While the critic sees echoes of Benjamin’s “left wing melancholy,” Nadia Khomami in The Guardian says, “It is possible to take away an optimistic message from the work.”

The artist explains that “In the Bible, Corinthians 13:12, ‘through a glass, darkly’ meant the impossibility of viewing the full scope of divine plans. In a more earthly, secular context, I consider 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 works that Mohaiemen selected for the exhibition include Robert Rauschenberg’s Surface Series (from Currents) (1970) screenprints drawn from newspaper headlines; documentation of Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), in which the artist piled earth onto an abandoned Kent State building until its collapse. 

Through a Mirror, Darkly by Naeem Mohaiemen.
Commissioned in partnership by The Wexner Center for the Arts.
Commissioned and Produced by Artangel.
In partnership with Film and Video Umbrella.

Corinthians, the presentation at the Wex, is curated by the Wexner Center’s Curator of Exhibitions Rebecca Lowery.

The film was presented by Artangel at Albany House, London, through November 9, 2025. After the US premiere at the Wexner Center, the film travels to the UK, with presentations at Bonington Gallery, Nottingham; The Hunterian, Glasgow; and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.

In addition to Corinthians, the Wexner Center’s galleries will also feature shows dedicated to work by Ximena Garrido-Lecca and Hew Locke.