The current Hunterian exhibit explores how student protest challenges and is challenged by the state.
The Hunterian Museum’s exhibit THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY has been showcasing a triptych film work by New York based artist Naeem Mohaiemen since June of this year. The work centres on May 1970, a month where American students who protested racism at home and war abroad were met with state violence. Its accompanying exhibition asks: how can this moment several decades ago in the United States speak to the experiences of students in Glasgow now?
The Glasgow Guardian met with Dominic Paterson, who worked on the exhibition and is a curator for contemporary art at the Hunterian, as well as Zoe Smythe, who works for the Hunterian on visitor experience, to learn more about the exhibition at the beginning of this summer.
The eponymous film in the exhibition shows archival footage from multiple unevenly remembered contemporary events from 1970.
“One is quite famous: the shooting of four students at Kent State University by National Guardsmen, which happened on the fourth of May. A few days later was the so-called Hard Hat Riot, where construction workers, many from the World Trade Center construction sites, came into New York to noisily contest anti-government student protest, and sort of stand up for America. Ten days after Kent State was the shooting of two young black men at Jackson State, a historically black college in the U.S., by local highway police,” says Paterson.
While the events at Kent State are well known, the Jackson State shootings are largely forgotten.
“You get these different things that are richly documented; things that aren’t,” says Paterson. “[Mohaiemen] is interested in where does debate happen, where do archives get generated, how does political memory get formed?”
For the University of Glasgow and across the United States now, the film is meant to recall the cyclical nature of state imposed boundaries on protest. In the shadow of student protests for divestment on UofG’s campus and around the world, as well as the militarization of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the United States, the footage takes on new meaning.
“The title, which is THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY, I think proposes in a way the whole texture of the film, which is this strange effect when we look back at the past and see echoes of our own moment,” says Paterson. ”It’s very hard to watch it as a viewer in 2025 or ‘26 and not think about the presence of the National Guard in American cities or on campuses, or the cultures of protest in recent times, how they’re policed, how they’re managed, and how they’ll be remembered.”
Making this connection through time and space is the Hunterian’s way of mirroring contemporary events at the University of Glasgow.
“We were really conscious of wanting to make a project that could be meaningful to students who are maybe less familiar with the history of the 1960s and ‘70s, but have lived through a very intense political moment where protest on campus has been part of our life together in the last few years. The questions Naeem is asking are relevant for other forms of experience, like maybe having taken part in sit-ins or protests about University of Glasgow’s relationship to the arms trade, or to ecological concerns, or about what’s happening in Gaza,” says Paterson.
For the Hunterian, the question of remembrance is personal: the exhibition will be remembered as their response to University action and student protests happening right outside their doors. This means understanding its own position in the midst of conflict.
“If the Hunterian doesn’t position itself as neutral, it certainly doesn’t position itself as better than the University. We’re part of it, and that’s a complicated position. It’s almost always a good thing for us, but it doesn’t mean you necessarily agree with all aspects, either as individuals or as an institution,” says Paterson. “We’re trying to experiment more than be the conscience of the University.”
While the film is central to the exhibition, the Hunterian has placed it among other objects which contextualize it to contemporary Glasgow.
“The film is an hour and 20 minutes long. It’s a fairly intense viewing experience. It’s dealing with very serious and troubling themes. There are images of war and violence in it. We’re conscious that we want to support that viewing experience by having other ways of engaging and thinking about what you’ve seen, and also the architecture of our gallery means that there is space for exhibits to have different layers to them. The goal is that they come together into a moment in time during the exhibition where everything supports and dovetails with everything else,” says Paterson.
One of these ways of engaging includes collaboration with students, which Paterson says was a priority for the exhibition: “We identified that we wanted to work in a kind of participatory way with students here.”
This collaboration was meant to reinforce the central idea of the past being present in current campus protests.
“We wanted to feel that for students, although the Hunterian is an historical collection, it can speak to the present. There’s things that they would recognize as the world they inhabit, not just the world of the past or of high society or royalty of years gone by,” says Paterson.
Zoe Smythe’s work on the exhibition was largely concerned with connecting Mohaiemen’s work back to University of Glasgow students through creating a zine. The zine was produced by students, and explores the theme of protest and the role of art in activism. She says the best thing about it is the diversity of the group which made it: “there were pharmacology, politics, and media as well as the history of art students”.
The whole exhibition mirrors a change in the museum’s structure: it is not neutral, but it is also not separate from the University or its actions and cannot position itself as such.
“It’s part of a shift in thinking about how the Hunterian works. It’s not necessarily the author of everything, sometimes it’s the space that makes other people’s authorship possible,” says Paterson.
You can visit the Hunterian Art Gallery & Museum through 11 October to see THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY and its accompanying exhibition for yourself, including the zine.
