Mariam Ghani

Biography

Mariam Ghani was born in 1978 in Brooklyn, New York, of Afghan and Lebanese descent. Her father, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, is president of Afghanistan. Her mother, Rula Saade, is a Lebanese citizen. Ghani grew up in exile and was unable to travel to Afghanistan until 2002, at age 24. Her family lived in the suburbs of Maryland. Ghani earned her degrees from New York University and the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan in comparative literature and video photography and installation art. Ghani was an Eyebeam resident.

Work

Since 2004, Ghani has been working on a multi-media project entitled “Index of the Disappeared”, with her long-time collaborator Chitra Ganesh. 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. Some of the other materials are transcripts, some are scraps of video or radio clips. 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).

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. Other films, like The Trespassers, shown in Los Angeles in 2014, examines the problems inherent in translating languages. Ghani sees her use of digital media and technology as a toolkit for creating her art.

In addition to her creative art works, Ghani works as a journalist, and writes and lectures on issues effecting the diaspora and as a member of the Gulf Labor Working Group, which is an advocacy group for workers building museums in Abu Dhabi. 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. She has also commented that Radio Television Afghanistan has an "amazingly rich archive of audiovisual material deserving of wider attention." 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.