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American artist (born 1978) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mariam Ghani (Pashto/Dari: مریم غنی; born 1978) is an Afghan-American visual artist, photographer, filmmaker and social activist.
Mariam Ghani | |
|---|---|
| مریم غنی | |
_(cropped).jpg) | |
| Born | 1978 (age 45–46) New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | Visual artist, photographer, filmmaker, social activist |
| Years active | 2000–present |
| Parent(s) | Ashraf Ghani Rula Saade |
Mariam Ghani was born in 1978 in Brooklyn, New York, [1] of Afghan and Lebanese descent, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, was president of Afghanistan.[2] Her mother, Rula Saade, is a Lebanese citizen.[3] Ghani grew up in exile and was unable to travel to Afghanistan until 2002, at age 24.[3] Her family lived in the suburbs of Maryland. Ghani earned her degrees from New York University and the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan[1] in comparative literature and video photography and installation art.[4] Ghani was an Eyebeam resident.[5][6] She is a member of the Visual Arts Faculty at Bennington College.[7]
Since 2004, Ghani has been working on a multi-media project entitled “Index of the Disappeared”, with her long-time collaborator and partner Chitra Ganesh.[8] The project is a record of the United States' detention of immigrants post-9/11 and public reaction to the treatment of immigrants. The project has grown and evolved over time, leading to a short film, How Do You See the Disappeared?,and a web project.[9] Some of the other materials are transcripts, some are scraps of video or radio clips.[1] She has presented her exhibits at the Transmediale Berlin (2003), Liverpool (2004), EMAP Seoul (2005), Tate Modern London (2007), the National Gallery Washington (2008), Beijing (2009) and Sharjah (2009, 2011).[4]
In addition to the Index, she has made multiple film projects, like Like Water From a Stone a 2013 project Ghani filmed in Stavanger, Norway about the transformation the country underwent with the discovery of oil; or a 2014 short film made in Ferguson, Missouri looking at the social upheaval institutionalised inequity has created in the US.[2] Other films, like The Trespassers, shown in Los Angeles in 2014, examines the problems inherent in translating languages.[10] Ghani sees her use of digital media and technology as a toolkit for creating her art.[11]
In addition to her creative art works, Ghani works as a journalist,[4] and writes and lectures on issues affecting the diaspora and as a member of the Gulf Labor Working Group, which is an advocacy group for workers building museums in Abu Dhabi.[12] She is also working as an archivist to digitize and reimage works produced between 1978 and 1991 by Afghan state filmmakers during the Communist period.[1] She has also commented that Radio Television Afghanistan has an "amazingly rich archive of audiovisual material deserving of wider attention."[13] Much of her work has a political component and speaks to systemic inequality in social systems and economics. She is both a women's rights and human rights activist.[1]
Ghani's feature-length film What We Left Unfinished is a documentary of incomplete Afghan films created from 1978 to 1991. In a 2021 interview with Art Forum, Ghani described her film What We Left Unfinished as a reflection on Afghanistan's unsettled communist period, from unfinished artworks to unfinished political movements.[14]
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