WASHINGTON, DC.- For Freedoms, an artist-led organization deepening civic engagement by centering artists as essential to shaping a free and pluralist society, presents two new exhibitions marking the third and final year of its three-year artist residency with the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University. Night and Day, by artist Eric Gottesman, and Reflect, by artist Cannupa Hanska Luger, will be on view at the Corcoran October 28, 2026 – February 19, 2027.

NIGHT AND DAY

Night and Day centers on Ethiopian journalist and author Baalu Girma's controversial 1983 Amharic novel Oromay, written under Ethiopia’s Derg regime and banned shortly after its publication. Drawing on artist Eric Gottesman's longstanding engagement with the novel, the exhibition considers how artists create, communicate, and sustain cultural memory within and against conditions of censorship, political repression, and state violence.

The exhibition's title comes from Girma's own divided existence. By day, he worked at his desk writing propaganda for the Derg; by night, at his kitchen table, he wrote fiction in longhand, with pencil and paper. In Oromay, Girma drew on that same duality as a literary strategy, blending fact and fiction and borrowing techniques from Ethiopian poetic traditions like qine to encode political meaning beneath the surface of his prose, saying one thing while also saying another. Oromay stands as both a case study and a blueprint for fiction's capacity to interrogate power, not only under the Derg, but under oppressive political regimes more broadly.

Since 2011, Gottesman has developed a series of translations, interpretations, and adaptations of Oromay. In 2012, working with Yawoinshet Masresha and Girma's family, he co-published the first authorized translated excerpt of the novel, and only the second translation of Amharic fiction into English. In the years since, he has collaborated with designers, artists, writers, and filmmakers across Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the United States to translate the novel and the story of its author into new forms, including photography, video installation, collaborative workshops, works on paper, and sculpture.

“The legacy of this single book has obsessed me for over a decade. Girma’s storytelling, and his commitment to it despite the risks, serves as a gift and a lesson to artists working in various disciplines and in contexts where creativity can be seen as a threat,” says Eric Gottesman.

Night and Day asks a question Gottesman considers particularly urgent in the United States today: what can we do with a banned book? Using translation, strategies of doubling, and reciprocal viewing, the exhibition treats Girma's writing not only as inspiration but, at times, as raw physical material, examining how art can construct what Gottesman calls a politics of possibility. Taken together, the works on view ask what Girma's writing reveals about the risks artists take to speak freely, in the Ethiopia where he wrote and in the United States today, where freedom of expression is likewise under duress.

The exhibition brings together photography, video, sculpture, and works on paper spanning two decades of Gottesman's engagement with Oromay. Its title work, Night and Day / ቅነ ጥሬጰዛ, a kinetic sculpture created with designer Jomo Tariku and artist Adiskidan Ambaye, combines plywood, etched acrylic, scrolls of cotton, paper, and thread, pigment prints, and a motion-sensing motor. Baalu Girma's Portrait, a three-channel video installation, draws on interviews with the author's wife, Almaz, his daughter, Meskerem Girma, and his best friend, Abiyi Ford, offering a rare, intimate portrait of the man behind the novel. Other works draw directly on the physical object of the book itself: Flag incorporates screenprinting on pages of the banned novel. Additional works include the films Colonel's Mirror (2017) and Elilta and Fiammeta (2026); My Flesh and My Soul, spanning 2012 to 2026; and Absence (2006), a redacted stack of C-41 photographic prints made in Ethiopian photography studios.

The exhibition includes works made in collaboration with designers, artists, writers, and filmmakers including Jomo Tariku, Daniel Debebe Negatu, Yoni Brook, Adiskidan Ambaye, Tegegn Samuel, and Yawoinshet Masresha, among others.

REFLECT

Reflect is a living archive of Cannupa Hanska Luger's Mirror Shield Project, marking ten years since its creation. Rooted in Northern Plains Indigenous traditions, “counting coup” describes an act of courage defined not by violence but by approaching an adversary closely enough to recognize their humanity without causing harm. Luger utilizes this principle as an artistic methodology grounded in proximity, accountability, restraint, and recognition, one that runs throughout Counting Coup: We Are the People, his broader residency encompassing exhibitions, public programs, and community activities.

“Ten years since the creation of a mirror shield and the concept remains relevant. My personal thoughts are that someday it will be forgotten and the need for such devices will become unfathomable,” says Cannupa Hanska Luger.

The Mirror Shield Project was initiated by Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota) in 2016 in support of the Water Protectors at Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Oceti Sakowin) Camp near Standing Rock, North Dakota. Luger, who grew up on the Standing Rock Reservation, developed the project as an artistic response and a way to mobilize creative communities in solidarity with the Indigenous sovereignty and the protection of land and water.

Designed from lightweight, inexpensive, readily available materials, the shields were intentionally easy to reproduce. While an Artist-in-Residence at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Luger worked with Oglala Lakota/Diné filmmaker Razelle Benally to create How to Build Mirror Shields for Water Protectors, an instructional film shared openly through social media. Within weeks, artists, activists, students, families, anonymous community members across the country created and transported an upwards of a thousand mirrored shields to Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Camp, while Water Protectors made additional shields onsite.

From the beginning, Luger imagined the mirrored surfaces not only as a form of protection, but as a way to turn the gaze of surveillance back upon itself. Working with artist Rory Erler Wakemup (Minnesota Chippewa Tribe) and the Water Protector community at Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, hundreds of shields were brought together in a large-scale action in which Water Protectors moved through the camp holding mirrors overhead, their bodies forming a river. The reflective surfaces were turned skyward toward the police surveillance aircraft continually circling above the camp, returning the apparatus of surveillance back onto those watching from above. In other frontline actions, the mirrors reflected the militarized police back to themselves, attempting to interrupt the abstraction of conflict and reveal the human being behind the uniform.

The Mirror Shield Project emerged from a much larger movement of Indigenous liberation already underway at Standing Rock. The resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline was not simply an environmental campaign, but an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty, relationship, and responsibility to land, water, and future generations. The Mirror Shield Project became Luger’s contribution to that larger movement: an artwork conceived not simply to represent resistance, but to become useful within it. A humble act of making in one place could become an act of solidarity somewhere else.

In the decade since Standing Rock, the project has continued to move between frontline action, Indigenous land and water defense, community making, performance, exhibition, and scholarship. Because the design was released as open source by the artist, its history belongs not to a single author, but to the many hands and communities that have carried it forward. Mirrored shields have appeared in Stop Line 3 actions opposing the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, in Black Lives Matter actions across the United States, and anonymously in resistance movements around the world. In many of its museum presentations, the project has remained active rather than archival, inviting communities to make and activate new shields locally and allowing the work to move beyond exhibition spaces and back into community and social action.

At the Corcoran, Reflect celebrates this ten-year lineage while carrying the engagement ethos of the Mirror Shield Project forward. The exhibition functions as both a living archive and a working toolshed. Visitors, artists, students, and community groups are invited not only to encounter the history of the project, but to participate in its continued life through social collaboration, shield-making, and performance activation.

Ten years after Standing Rock, the full reach of the Mirror Shield Project remains impossible to trace — and that is precisely its legacy. The larger movement for Indigenous liberation continues to take new forms: asserting sovereignty, defending land and water, strengthening relationships, and imagining futures beyond colonial systems. Within the larger living Indigenous liberation movement, the Mirror Shield Project continues in motion, carried forward not through ownership, but through participation.