Mariam Ghani. The City & The City. Like Water from a Stone (Petroleum Playground) When the Spirits Moved Them, They Moved. The Garden of Forked Tongues. Speculations No. 96 (Kabul, 2013) To Live. A Brief History of Collapses. Index of the Disappeared: Black Sites I. …

Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work operates at the intersections of language, loss, migration, memory, and history. Her films, public projects, photographs, and installations have been presented and collected worldwide, notably in Times Square and the new Terminal C at LaGuardia Airport; the Guggenheim, New Museum, MoMA ...

Mariam Ghani: Partial Reconstructions. With an essay by Sadia Shirazi and an interview with Leeza Ahmady. Schneider Museum of Art, 2022. “Rahraw Omarzad on the Future of Afghan Arts” in Frieze, March 2022. “How Do You See the Disappeared? A Warm Database” in The Art Happens Here: Net Art Anthology (Rhizome, 2019).

poster for Dis-Ease (Mariam Ghani / Indexical Films, 2024) SYNOPSIS DIS-EASE is a feature-length documentary about how we imagine disease, and how that affects what we do when we encounter illness, outbreaks, doctors, treatments, and disability in real life.

My practice is based on research into places, spaces and moments where social, political and cultural structures take on visible and tangible forms. I am interested in understanding both how we reconstruct the past in the present, and how we construct the present for the future, through shifting private and public narratives. Sometimes this research…

Mariam also presented the project at the Creative Time Summit in Stockholm in 2014, at MoMA C-MAP and the Creative Capital Retreat (see video below) in 2015, at the Dhaka Art Summit and Berlinale Forum Expanded in 2016, and at the Seattle Asian Art Museum in 2017.

As a visual artist and independent filmmaker, Mariam Ghani has produced or co-produced 28 short films and multiple-channel installations, six transmedia projects, live cinema events, and a number of traveling film programs,…

Mariam Ghani’s The Worlds We Speak (debossed, glazed, handmade ceramic tile; brushed steel; approx. 365 sq. ft.; 2022) installed at LaGuardia Airport Terminal C. The Worlds We Speak visualizes the linguistic diversity of the tri-state metropolitan area as a colorful mosaic of handmade ceramic tiles. For this commission, Ghani partnered with ...

Mariam Ghani + Erin Ellen Kelly, When the Spirits Moved Them, They Moved, installed at Ryan Lee Gallery, NYC, January 2019; click to view additional photos from the series

To Live is performed by Evelyna Dann, Erin Ellen Kelly, Mariam Ghani, and Ophra Wolf, and narrated by Ghani.