Revealing the Unseen: Mariam Ghani

Words: David Alm

Photo: Chris Jones

Even the most humanistic political artists can lose sight of the personal when dealing with the abstract. Mariam Ghani is the exception. Heady and compelling, the Brooklyn artist's film, installation and Web projects address timely issues like immigration, diaspora and the reconstruction of her father?s native Afghanistan (her mother is Lebanese). Her open-ended, Web-based work, How Do You See the Disappeared?, presents what she calls "warm data," the unquantifiable pieces of information that define a human being, on émigrés seeking political asylum in the U.S. Through questions like "Who was your first love?" and "What do you see when you close your eyes?" Ghani develops abstract yet intimate portraits that privilege subjectivity and experience over hard facts. Thus her subjects' humanity transcends the "cold data" that otherwise define them within legal and bureaucratic systems. At 26, Ghani is rising fast in the New York art world, surprisingly for someone who once planned on teaching comparative literature. After graduating from NYU, Ghani changed course to study video art and film at SVA, receiving her MFA in 2002. Since then she has shown in some of New York's preeminent galleries, film venues and museums; last year she was an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam, where she begins teaching this summer. Ghani's academic training gives her an intellectual breadth rare in young artists. "I still have a very literary approach," she notes, citing the influence of late theorist Edward Said -- particularly his notion of contrapuntal narratives. "I'm primarily interested in how history is narrated and the terms of that narration." For Ghani the work is urgent: "It's the burden of Sheherazade," she says, referring to the Arabian folk tale of a young woman who told her king one story a night for 1,001 nights to avoid execution. "It's about telling stories in order to stay alive."