Mariam Ghani

Image of Mariam Ghani

Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work looks at places, spaces and moments where social, political and cultural structures take on visible forms, and spans video, sound, installation, photography, performance, text and data. 

 

(for Bennington College related communications only)

Biography

The email address above is for Bennington-related communications only. Any media inquiries and speaking/screening requests should be directed to Ghani’s film distributors in the relevant territory. Art-related requests should be directed to Ryan Lee Gallery, NYC. 

Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work looks at places, spaces and moments where social, political and cultural structures take on visible forms, and spans video, sound, installation, photography, performance, text and data. Ghani has exhibited and screened at the Guggenheim, MoMA, Met Breuer and Queens Museum in New York, and 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. Some of her recent texts have been published in e-Flux, Frieze, Foreign Policy, Triple Canopy, and 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. Ghani has received a number of fellowships, awards, grants, and residencies, most recently from Creative Capital, Art Matters, the 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles, the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, which gave her their inaugural Changemaker Storyteller award in 2017.

Ghani 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: critical, curatorial, conservation and creative 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 began her teaching career in 2005 by helping to launch the BA in Arts & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology. Since then she has taught in the BFA programs at Parsons and Cooper Union, the MFA programs at Pratt and Washington University in St. Louis, the MA program in Art & Public Policy at NYU, the MFA Social Practice program at Queens College, and the Film Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She was one of the first guest teachers in the MFA Public Practice program at Otis, and has taught post-graduate master classes at the Beirut Art Center, Townhouse in Cairo, ProArte in St. Petersburg, and CCAA in Kabul. Her teaching is focused on fostering research-based, critical, collaborative, dialogical, ephemeral, interdisciplinary, participatory, and/or site-responsive practices. Ghani joined the Bennington faculty in Fall 2018.