Mariam Ghani, Selected Video Works

Bar Laika is very pleased to present an evening with Mariam Ghani, featuring a screening of selected video works and Q&A with the artist.

Kabul 2, 3, 4, 2002-07, 13:00 minutes, excerpt 6:00 minutes
Six-minute single-channel excerpt from a three-channel video usually presented as three vertically stacked monitors; filmed in Kabul in 2002 (bottom channel), 2003 (center channel), and 2004 (top channel), finished in 2007. Kabul 2, 3, 4 tracks changes on the surface of the city (as well as the remnants of its past that remain untouched) during the “open moment” (a period full of hopes that would be disappointed) of Kabul’s post-conflict reconstruction.

Blind Crossing, 2001, 2:30 minutes
Blind Crossing uses text from Middle Passages (1992), a book by the Caribbean poet and theorist Kamau Braithwaite, to defamiliarize imagery of the harbor by Chelsea Piers and summon the specters of forced migration. (Text used by permission of the author.)

Permanent Transit, 2001-02, 24:00 minutes
A road movie about the state of statelessness filmed through the windows of cars, trains, buses, planes, boats, airports, hotels, and borrowed houses in eleven countries between East and West. Several fragmented narratives about borders, transit, and “no man’s lands” wind through the film, all told or implied by offscreen sound, including a recurring story retold from a comedy sketch by Syrian comedian Duraid Lahham, popular on Lebanese TV during the civil war. In the screening version of this work, the sound of different places mixes and mingles together, creating an uneasy sense of disorientation.

Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker whose work spans video, sound, installation, photography, performance, text, and data. She has exhibited and screened at the Guggenheim, MoMA, Met Breuer, and Queens Museum in New York, at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the CCCB in Barcelona, the Rotterdam and CPH:DOX film festivals, the Sharjah and Liverpool Biennials, the Dhaka Art Summit, and documenta 13 in Kabul and Kassel, among others. Her texts have been published in e-flux, Frieze, Foreign Policy, and Triple Canopy, and in the readers Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency and Cultural Production, Critical Writing Ensembles, Dissonant Archives, Social Medium: Artists Writing 2000-2015, and Utopian Pulse: Flares in the Darkroom. 

She is known for projects that engage with places, ideas, issues, and institutions over long periods of time, often as part of long-term collaborations. These include work with the national film archive Afghan Films, since 2012, with support from the media archiving collective Pad.ma and a number of international art institutions; the video and performance series Performed Places, ongoing since 2006, in collaboration with choreographer Erin Ellen Kelly and composer Qasim Naqvi; and the experimental archive and discussion platform Index of the Disappeared, initiated with artist Chitra Ganesh in 2004, which has also become a vehicle for collaborations with other activists, archivists, artists, journalists, lawyers, and scholars. Ghani’s first feature-length film, the documentary What We Left Unfinished, recently premiered at the 2019 Berlinale. Through spring 2019, Ghani is a visiting scholar at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY and a fellow at the New York Public Library. She is also a member of the permanent faculty in Film/Video at Bennington College.

For more information, contact laika@e-flux.com.