Naeem Mohaiemen Illuminates Forgotten Histories Through His New Film on Kent State

1 October 2025

Naeem Mohaiemen’s Through a Mirror Darkly installation at London’s Albany House. Photograph: Thierry Bal/PR IMAGE

In London’s Albany House, the artist Naeem Mohaiemen introduces Through a Mirror Darkly, a three-channel film installation that juxtaposes the widely memorialized Kent State shootings of May 1970 with the lesser known Jackson State killings that occurred just days later. The former event when four unarmed students were shot dead by the National Guard during an anti-Vietnam War protest has become embedded in American collective memory, immortalised by the iconic image of a young woman screaming over a fallen peer and immortalised in Neil Young’s song Ohio. Yet the deaths of two Black students at Jackson State, in a police shooting that followed ten days later, remain largely marginalized in public discourse.

Mohaiemen, originally from Bangladesh and educated in the US, says he spent years pondering why Jackson State never assumed the same symbolic weight as Kent State. After moving to the United States in 1989 to attend Oberlin College, he says it took him nearly fifteen years to even learn about the Jackson State incident. He reflects on how “different lives have different resonances,” and questions why some deaths are canonised while others remain shadows in the archives.

In creating Through a Mirror Darkly, Mohaiemen weaves archival footage and modern audio into a layered narrative that interrogates which stories are preserved and which are buried. The film explores how, after the shootings, the Nixon administration harnessed them to propagate a narrative of campus chaos and the need for stricter university policing, framing dissent as a symptom of communist infiltration. Mohaiemen holds that era up against today’s battles over campus protest, political polarization, and how memory is shaped by power.

One of the striking contrasts the film highlights is how Kent State has become a ritual site of pilgrimage, with memorials and repeated acknowledgment in American history, while Jackson State has lagged in recognition. This discrepancy, Mohaiemen suggests, reflects not only racial and institutional inequities but also the choices society makes about which traumas to remember. He draws parallels between that era and the present, citing how modern technological media both democratizes storytelling and traps people in echo chambers that reinforce partisan divisions.

Mohaiemen also situates the 1970s as a pivotal decade he describes as “now promise, now danger.” It dawned with optimism about progressive change and ended with systemic reversals: oil crises, the rise of conservative political movements, and global conflicts that reshaped notions of democracy. He sees echoes of those patterns today.

In our conversation about how campuses have shifted, he notes that the dynamics that once centered on “communism” as a threat have given way to new fault lines: inside universities now are international students, religious minorities, and racial tensions, and today’s dog whistles often draw on Islamophobia or coded xenophobia. He suggests that campuses remain battlegrounds for these cultural conflicts.

The artist draws on the literary epigram often attributed to Mark Twain: history doesn’t repeat exactly, but it rhymes. He argues we see recurring patterns as old tensions morph into new forms. As technology transforms how dissent and narrative circulate, he believes it provides tools for both liberation and confinement.

Commissioned by Artangel, Through a Mirror Darkly joins Mohaiemen’s ongoing practice of rigorous research and multimedia storytelling. His earlier work, Two Meetings and a Funeral, was a Turner Prize nominee in 2018, and in that project as in this one he consistently interrogates the interplay of memory, power, and geopolitical movements.

Though the film revisits events more than five decades old, its reverberations feel urgent. Mohaiemen underscores how divisions over class and culture that erupted in the 1970s still inform present-day politics. He points to examples such as the Hardhat Riots where blue collar workers attacked student protestors in New York, casting students as elite and lazy. He sees similar divisions being weaponised today.

But there is a measure of hope in his work. Despite its focus on violent rupture, Mohaiemen suggests that democracy has weathered storms of suppression before. He notes that after Nixon, a pendulum swing occurred and public institutions helped expose wrongdoing rather than amplify it. He refuses to conclude that democracy is doomed, even as he warns us to stay alert to how narratives are shaped.

By threading together Kent State and Jackson State, Mohaiemen forces us to reconsider whose stories we carry forward, whose sufferings matter, and how power filters history. He asks us to think about the silences that surround us, and to listen to the resonances of lives that memory forgot. Through a Mirror Darkly is not just a retrospective film but a meditation on memory, justice, and the politics of remembrance.