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Protected: Mariam Ghani

Andy K-B

The Fire This Time, 2022

4K DCP, 5.1 ch sound, color

RT 24:42

2-channel color video projection with spatialized surround sound
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The Fire This Time explores Mariam Ghani’s research into three historical episodes over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries: (1) the cholera pandemic of the 19th century, (2) the third plague pandemic at the turn of the 20th century, and (3) the 1918 influenza pandemic. Ghani recognized patterns in the social stratosphere of each of these events, comparing their parallels to the current COVID-19 pandemic. She realized that these events all resulted in immense social change, particularly through forms of social unrest such as rioting and the mass destruction of property.

The film is broken up into three chapters, each including interviews with various scholars and scientists. The visuals are primarily archival, found by Ghani from a wide range of sources. The artist depicts the images in frames within frames, looping and shuffling through them to mimic the cyclical patterns of history. In each chapter, non-archival footage ghosts in and out, producing the effect of an archive hallucinating its own obsolescence or subversion. Ghani shoots her non-archival footage in nature, later abstracting it through colorizing and blending. Ghani’s formal choices are intended to emphasize the cyclical patterns of the historical episodes she interrogates, in turn reinforcing the connections between the ecological, social, and political stratospheres. 

Mariam Ghani
There's a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be (work in progress), 2023
There’s a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be is a series of works about memory and mourning. It departs from the premise that both grief and black holes are so dense and intense that they bend space and time around their specific gravity – warping perspectives, reshaping the physical world, and throwing those caught in their orbit out of temporal sync. Ghani combines old negatives and prints with newer footage and audio to reconstruct her own memories, and using black hole images and simulations from NASA to create warp effects and animations.
It is part of a larger series in progress called Deprecated Systems, about abandoned symbols and lingering superstitions.
Mariam Ghani + Erin Ellen Kelly

When the Spirits Moved Them, They Moved, 2019

Three channel video

RT 23:36

Edition of 4

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When the Spirits Moved Them, They Moved condenses a day-long performance by dancers from Louisville and Lexington into a 22-minute meditation on Shaker landscaping, architecture, song, and dance rituals. The Shakers aimed to found a utopian society grounded in simplicity, celibacy, and equality of race and gender. Once boasting 4,000-5,000 Believers across 19 communities from New England to Kentucky, only two people in the world maintain the faith today.

The three-channel video When the Spirits Moved Them, They Moved navigates through the historic meeting house and pastures of Pleasant Hill, evoking the Shakers’ lost way of life through their enduring physical sites. When the Spirits Moved Them, They Moved also includes a series of photographs — dye transfer prints on alu-dibond — which experiment with the diptych and triptych forms of Shaker gift drawings. The photographs convey the relationships between the Kentucky landscape, the architecture the Shakers sited within it, and the forms of movement made possible by that architecture.

When the Spirits Moved Them They Moved - Installation View
Mariam Ghani + Erin Ellen Kelly
Mariam Ghani, When the Spirits Moved Them They Moved, installed in RYAN LEE Gallery, 2019
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When the Spirits Moved Them They Moved - Installation View
Mariam Ghani + Erin Ellen Kelly
Mariam Ghani, When the Spirits Moved Them They Moved, installed in RYAN LEE Gallery, 2019
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Mariam Ghani

Dis-Ease, 2018-2019

RT 08:45

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In 2018, to mark the centenary of the 1918 influenza pandemic, the Wellcome Trust commissioned four artists in four cities to make projects about migration, mobility, virality, and contagion. As New York City’s artist-in-residence, Ghani researched imagery centered around the “war on disease” and how the concept impacts structural and social inequities — in how the sick are treated, who public health serves, and how the government responds to pandemics. As Ghani explores and showcases imagery of contagion, she also proposes alternative models and metaphors to create a new visual language around disease.

Dis-Ease still- A nurse stabbing a dragon encircling a globe (Italian Red Cross 1920 Appeal for Tuberculosis, Wellcome Collection)

Dis-Ease still

A nurse stabbing a dragon encircling a globe (Italian Red Cross 1920 Appeal for Tuberculosis, Wellcome Collection)

Dis-Ease still- Drawing of plague-carrying rat made by Albert Lloyd Tarter for an unproduced film in the 1940s (Wellcome Collection)

Dis-Ease still

Drawing of plague-carrying rat made by Albert Lloyd Tarter for an unproduced film in the 1940s (Wellcome Collection)

Mariam Ghani

A Brief History of Collapses, 2011-2012

2-channel color video projection with spatialized surround sound

RT 22:30

Edition of 4

A Brief History of Collapses exploits the uncanny architectural similarity between two buildings constructed two centuries and a continent apart — the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany and the Darulaman Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan — to explore both similarities and differences in their histories, myths, uses, and contexts. Each building represents a specific moment in which an impulse to open society was crystallized in architecture; and each also represents — to those who know the history (or can read it in the bones of the buildings) — a series of blows delivered to those ideals, which resulted in the collapses of both dreams and buildings. A Brief History of Collapses sends two cameras on parallel courses through the two buildings, tracking through corridors and rooms and stairwells, past remnants and rubble and residue, figures that continually escape either the frame of the camera or the framework of the architecture. 

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Mariam Ghani, A Brief History of Collapses, installed at dOCUMENTA
Mariam Ghani, A Brief History of Collapses (2011-2012) installed at dOCUMENTA 13, 2012
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