The photographic triptych, The Angel’s Black Leg, is part of a series of work by mounir fatmi called The Blinding Light, which was inspired by a 15th century painting titled, The Healing of Deacon Justinian, by the Italian painter, Fra Angelico. The painting depicts two saints, Cosmas and his brother Damian, who have come back to life to perform a surgery in which a black leg, from an Ethiopian man recently deceased, is grafted onto the deacon. It is a striking image, unexpected and rare to this see this odd fusion of black and white, of living and dead, of the divine and of science. In this one scene Fra Angelico has questioned ideas race, hybridization, and identity. The triptych, The Angel’s Black Leg, is one of the earlier pieces in this ongoing project. Printed as Duratrans and presented in lightboxes, there is an added transparency to the images that creates a filmic effect, and the format of the three images resembles a strip of film. The two side images are like x-rays of the Fra Angelico painting, black and white, the color removed. The scene feels ghostlike, as if viewing through a grainy filter. The impression of looking at enlarged film stills is re-emphasized in the central image which shows a close up of a bundle of black tape from a VHS cassette. The slick, reflective surfaces are crunched up together, offering a sort of void, as if this were the footage of a film that has been removed, the image in between the stills, erased.