If our movie memories weren't Hollywood-skewed, we'd think of Chronicle of the Years of Embers as a classic but, despite winning the Palme d'or in Cannes in 1975, Mohammad Lakhdar-Hamina's film has fallen into the shadows.
In all these cases, the questions stay in the shadows, in the dark.
For cities shadows present both a technical challenge – one that can be modelled in 3D and measured in "theoretical annual sunlight hours" lost – and an ethereal one, changing the feeling of space and the value of property in ways that are hard to define.
The Man Booker prize may be one of the last shadows of that empire, evoking as it does an imagined community unchanged since 1921, when Irish independence began its demise.
Washington also illustrates that shadows, like buildings themselves, are relative.
In one corner, Abbas was overseeing the hanging of his atmospheric black-and-white prints of human shadows, while in another the young South African artist Mikhael Subotzky was fine-tuning the colour definition on his video and sound projection.
Beyond the village, the wide trunks of baobab trees cast shadows across the Sahelian landscape where the Sambisa game reserve stretches ominously.
In 2002 Remzija returned to rebuild what remained of the family home in Potocari, a small village nestled in misty mountain shadows, 6km north-west of the town of Srebrenica.
Where there were once elaborate homes, ski lodges, spas, restaurants and boutique hotels, there are now just gigantic scraped rectangles of red earth, with the great shadows of charred and crippled trees falling across them.
The insight of Durer – not to mention Shakespeare and Cervantes – that mental shadows are part of human life was lost on the founders of London's Bethlem Hospital.
We live in the shadows of larger-than-life leaders who had big ideas and made an impact.
