Naeem Mohaiemen: THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY

Produced by Artangel, and commissioned in partnership with Film and Video Umbrella and Wexner Center for the Arts, the film examines the turbulent 1970s. It focuses on American students in Ohio and Mississippi protesting overseas wars and domestic racism, who were met by lethal state violence over ten days in May 1970. The tragedies at Kent State University, Ohio, and Jackson State College, Mississippi, arose from National Guard (Ohio) and State Police (Mississippi) firing on students, yet the difference in how they were reported and remembered is striking. The deaths of students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder at Kent State University, Ohio, became the subject of national outrage. Lost in the media focus were Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, the two students killed ten days later by police officers at Jackson State, Mississippi – a historically Black college. Mohaiemen’s inquiry into this racialised disparity of remembering sparked the creation of this film. Alongside, Mohaiemen has created two new series of works specifically for John Hansard Gallery in a departure from his established practice. After Robert Rauschenberg: Surface(d) Prints – Southampton 01, 02, and 03 (2026) echo artist Robert Rauschenberg’s (1925–2008) large-scale prints Surface Series (1970). Mohaiemen collaborated with Joy Yi Lu Freund using facsimiles from the University of Southampton’s student newspaper to produce collages that reflect Southampton politics from the early 1970s. Ho Chi Minh Sarani (2026) takes its title from state-level ‘agitprop’ measures of 1970s Kolkata, India. This marks a moment in the ‘long sixties’ when Vietnam became a global symbol for anticolonial struggle. Here, Mohaiemen collaborated with Juli Raja to create sixteen woodblock reinterpretations of traditional Vietnamese patterns, overlaid with historical Vietnamese figures from both sides of the war. Additionally, Mohaiemen presents Afsan’s Long Day (2014), a film that addresses the question of unreliable allies within the ‘lost left moment’ of the 1970s, from the perspective of Bangladeshi historian Afsan Chowdhury. Excerpts from his diary entries reflect on a day when uniformed officers mistook this Dhaka resident for Karl Marx. Accompanying the film is Live True Life or Die Trying (2009) a series of photo-text dyads that capture the polarities of how we photograph our ideological ‘other.’ The companion text, which owes a debt to filmmaker Chris Marker’s (1921–2012) Grin Without a Cat (1977), navigates the ghost of a left decline that is at odds with the photographer’s desire to exaggerate the size of the crowd. Commissioned and produced by Artangel. Commissioned in partnership with Film and Video Umbrella and The Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. Supported by Experimenter. The UK tour has been convened by Film and Video Umbrella. Exhibition Partners are The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton and Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University.