"Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence" is not just smoke and mirrors. Curated by José Roca and now on view at The Contemporary Museum, the show offers insight into how death, loss and historical trauma can be made visible to us.

The exhibition draws inspiration from the 18th- and 19th-century entertainment created by magic lanterns and shadow projections, phantasmagorical spectacles that were the early predecessors to slides, film and other mass media. Though the itinerate showmen who put on these displays delighted their audiences, many of the themes or narratives of phantasmagoria were macabre. The same dynamic can be experienced in "Phantasmagoria."

Many of the works invoke surprise, wonder and pure sensation to convey significant, weighty themes. Columbian artist Oscar Muñoz's "Aliento," for instance, offers a suite of small mirrors installed in a row at face level. They seem innocent enough as they play upon our attraction to reflections (especially of ourselves). We are invited by the wall text to breathe on the surfaces of the mirrors. As we do, we call forth ghostly faces of anonymous dead people taken from Columbian newspapers. By asking us to use our bodies in this kind of socially compromising way (getting so close to the art work doesn't seem like something we should do) Muñoz breaks down notions of decorum that can invite an unsettling relationship to those absent people. We are forced to reckon with their ephemeral existence, and, by extension, our own.

Though not as interactive, the South African artist William Kentridge's "Shadow Procession," an animation of figures displaced by war, also captures how the traumatic loss of lives and civil rights in the recent past can weigh on us in the present. Like most of the artist's work, this piece is about how we should remember and come to grips with apartheid. It presents no narrative, but instead offers a steady pace of people, walking to the haunting songs of Johannesburg street musician Alfred Makgalemele. The sorrowful projection invites us to slow down and watch the procession of history's anonymous victims become visible, if only in silhouette, before our eyes.

While these two works employ the notion of absence and presence in evocative ways, other pieces fail to fully engage with these thematics. Michel Delacroix's "Lisetta, Ferdinand, Saverio, Edward," for instance, invites the viewer to stomp forcibly next to his thin tripod structures to disturb the reflected images they project onto the wall. The piece demands too much clunky interaction and offers not enough transformation. Likewise, peering around the corner of a half-opened door to gaze down at the shadow play of Christian Boltanski's "The Dancer" doesn't have the impact of most of his other, larger, installation-based works.

Despite a few disappointments, many of the works are successful in employing simple mechanics to get the viewer involved. German artist Jeppe Hein and Mexican-Canadian artist Raphael Lozano-Hemmer's pieces ask us to question our dependence on vision as a way to verify our existence and our experiences of the here and now. Hein's "Smoking Bench" consists of a seemingly simple installation of a museum bench in front of mirror. We contemplate our image, to see ourselves as present in the space of the gallery. But as we sit, we activate a smoke machine within the bench. Shortly, we are subsumed in a fog that has a soft burning smell. In the mirror, we no longer exist, becoming the phantasm in the reflection. Yet we can also feel with our body and smell with our nose that we are still sitting there.

Lozano-Hemmer's "Sustained Coincidence (Subsculpture 8)," offers a similar subtly disconcerting experience. Installed in a separate room, a line of incandescent lights are operated by a computerized surveillance system that tracks our movement. As we move, the lights respond, casting shadows on the opposite wall with a slight delay that confuses our experience of where we are standing and walking.

The phantasmagorical effects of light and shadow in these works can help us come to terms with the notion that illusion and reality are not opposing concepts. Each are defined instead by subtle shifts in our perception of what we think can be known and what we determine is ultimately unknowable.

Jaimey Hamilton is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.