THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY

“In 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 hazier the many meanings of events in the mirror of memory become.”
– Naeem Mohaiemen

Naeem Mohaiemen’s new three-channel film, THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY examines the turbulent 1970s, a decade of hopeful rebellions and catastrophic disappointments, via flashpoint moments when American students protesting domestic racism and overseas wars were met by state violence in May 1970.

As the Vietnam War came to its bloody end, for the American media, the memory of four American students shot dead at Kent State University was sometimes as emotionally charged as the millions of deaths in Vietnam.

In the decades that followed, a memorial community has formed around the “four dead in Ohio.” Yet while the deaths of students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder at Kent State, Ohio, are remembered, not many recall Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, two students killed ten days later by police officers at Jackson State College, Mississippi, a Historically Black College.

By choreographing the relationship between archival footage and contemporary ceremonies memorialising the dead, THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY, explores the role of memorials as a focal point for individual and collective grief. By comparing Kent and Jackson State, the project underscores blind spots around racialised violence and class tensions, made concrete in the disparity in coverage of these two campus shootings. The inclusion of stage-managed press conferences reveals the political machinations of the Nixon administration who fuelled a backlash to antiwar protests.

Mohaiemen deftly presents these intersecting strands, weaving together the voices of key political players, student leaders, and the fabled “man on the street” alongside Vietnam veterans, to propose new interpretations of the events of May 1970 and their lasting impact.

Book here

Please note this film contains historic content featuring racialised language, images and graphic descriptions of violence, including death and acts of war. It may not be suitable for viewers under 16 years of age. Parental discretion advised.

Image: Naeem Mohaiemen, Still from THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY, three-channel film, 2025. Courtesy of Artangel.

An Evening of Performances

SOON Friday 24 October 2025

Performance

Join us for an evening of performance, poetry and music in response to our current project by Naeem Mohaiemen, THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY. With a focus on themes of grief, protest, racism and the question of whose history is memorialised, the performances offer additional perspectives furthering the conversations in Naeem Mohaiemen's project.

Featuring Anthony Anaxagorou, Theresa Lola, Nathaniel Mann, t l k, and Will Pham and the VLC Band

Guests are welcome to stay for a late screening of THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY, commencing at 20.30.

Location

Albany House, 94-98 Petty France, London SW1H 9EA

For access info, please email info@artangel.org.uk.

Book Tickets

Anthony Anaxagorou

Anthony Anaxagorou FRSL is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist and publisher.

His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics published with Granta Poetry in 2022, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award. It was listed as one of New Statesman’s top books of 2022.

His second collection, After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year.

Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre. He is the editor-in-chief of Propel Magazine, an online literary journal and the founder of WriteBack, a quarterly literary series held at the British Library.

Website: anthonyanaxagorou.com/
Instagram: @anthony_anaxagorou

T L Klein

t l k centres the voice-as-instrument, in live and recorded contexts, with palettes formed from vocal layers, found rhythms, analog synthesis and organic instrumentation. Fluid in genre and form, with a leaning towards cinematic ambient, downtempo electronic, skewed pop, neo-classical and musique concrète sensibilities, their works evolve from memory, dialogue, dreams and ongoing explorations into grief, memory, selfhood, human behaviour and its coalescence and tensions with the non-human.

Inspired by far-reaching influences such as minimalism, chaos theory, Taoism, Internal Family Systems and the school of Deep Listening, the ‘act of Noticing’ has evolved to be at the core of both t l k's music-making practice, and their approach to aliveness.

Website: https://tlkvox.com
Instagram: @tlkvox

Theresa Lola

Theresa Lola is a British Nigerian poet and artist. She has performed at Royal Albert Hall and ICA, has been commissioned by Rimowa and Selfridges, and designed programmes for Dulwich Picture Gallery and Hackney Museum. Her debut visual poetry exhibition was held at Bermondsey Project Space. She was appointed the 2019-2020 Young People’s Laureate for London. She is the author of two poetry collections. A poem from her debut book In Search of Equilibrium is in the UK’s GCSE syllabus. Her second collection Ceremony for the Nameless was praised in the Guardian as a book that “assures her place as a trailblazer for a new wave of poets.”

Website: https://www.theresalola.com/
Instagram: @theresa_lola

Nathaniel Mann

Nathaniel Mann is an experimental composer, performer, and sound designer. His expansive practice bridges music and sound art. He was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2019 and was an Arts Foundation Fellow in 2018. His work Pigeon Whistles (2013) — a flying orchestra of flute-carrying Birmingham Roller pigeons — won the George Butterworth Prize for Composition in 2015. He is one-third of the experimental folk trios Dead Rat Orchestra and Hack Poets Guild, whose acclaimed debut Black Letter Garland (2023) was named one of The Guardian’s Folk Albums of the Year.

Website: https://hackpoetsguild.com
Instagram: @nathaniel__mann

Will Pham

Will Pham (b.1990, London), is an interdisciplinary artist working across moving image, performance, painting, and socially engaged arts practice. He graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2018. Solo shows include: Ngon Qua at Deptford X 2025, and Little Vietnam at Turf Projects 2019. He lives and works in London.

Webiste: http://www.willpham.co.uk
Instagram: @willpham_

The VLC Band

The VLC band are a troupe of musicians primarily from Vietnam, led by Mr Lai. They are based at Centre 151, a Hackney-based community centre set up in 1985, formerly known as the Community Centre for Refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (VLC). The band members include Dan Tran, Doc Ngo, Thanh Long, Frankie, Hung, Hùng, Quang, Ngọc Nga, Quyen and with special guests including Duy Khiem.

About Naeem Mohaiemen

Naeem Mohaiemen

Naeem Mohaiemen was born in London, UK, grew up in Dhaka, Bangladesh and currently lives and works in New York, USA.
He works in film, photography, drawing, and writes essays. Forms of utopia-dystopia within families, borders, architecture, and uprisings beginning in South Asia that radiated transnationally after 1945 are all focuses of his work.

Several conversations around “nonalignment” as a concept container in contemporary art pivoted after the premiere of his film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017) at Documenta 14, which was nominated for the Turner Prize (2018).

Mohaiemen’s museum projects are represented by Experimenter Gallery (India) and film screenings are represented by LUX (UK); his work is in major international collections including British Museum and Tate Modern (London), Museum of Modern Art (New York), MACBA (Barcelona), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Kiran Nadar Museum (Delhi), National Gallery of Singapore, Art Institute of Chicago, Samdani Art Foundation and Sharjah Art Foundation.

Mohaiemen is co-editor with Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must Be Defended (Budapest, 2023) and with Lorenzo Fusi of System Error: War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Siena, 2007). He is the author of Bengal Photography’s Reality Quest (Dhaka, 2025), Baksho Rohoshyo (Umea, 2024), Midnight’s Third Child (Dhaka, 2023) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Basel, 2014). He is a faculty member at the Visual Arts Department, Columbia University.

Press

This is typical of the work’s openness and complexity. Mohaiemen forgoes a narrator or dogmatic agenda for multiple colliding images that leave you always feeling you are missing something, sowing doubt and ambiguity. One thread concerns the nature of public memory. Who gets memorialised and why? What makes one victim of violence a “martyr” while others are forgotten? – Jonathan Jones, 18 September 2025, The Guardian

Perhaps it is seeing the aging faces of the one-time student activists, perhaps it is the awareness that another blow-hard occupies the White House, that US foreign policy is once again catalysing campus unrest... but the film seems seeped in what Walter Benjamin described as ‘left-wing melancholy’. It is a feeling, consciously parlayed and played with, that is characteristic of Mohaiemen’s earlier works and their address to historical, transnational left-wing alliances." – Oliver Basciano , 09 September 2025, ArtReview

Albany House

Credits

THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY by Naeem Mohaiemen is commissioned and produced by Artangel.

Commissioned in partnership with Film and Video Umbrella and Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University.

Supported by Experimenter.

Exhibition Partners: The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton and Bonington Gallery, Nottingham.

Presented in London with thanks to Blue Orchid Hospitality and Central London Alliance, (CIC).

Artangel and Film and Video Umbrella are generously supported using public funding by Arts Council England. Artangel is generously supported by the private patronage of The Artangel International Circle, Special Angels, Guardian Angels and The Company of Angels.