February 2025
Mariam Ghani
Mariam Ghani discusses grief, memory, impermanence, and her new exhibition, Counting, Accounting, Recounting, in this reflective conversation with Curator Founder Dan Golden.
There's a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be, Excerpts from Parts 1 - 5, 2024
Dan Golden: Congratulations on your exhibit Counting, Accounting, Recounting at RYAN LEE Gallery. Could you share a brief overview of the show and the themes that inspired it?
Mariam Ghani: The show is about mourning, memory, black holes, war at a distance, and objects that have lost their original use value but have taken on symbolic significance.
DG: Your film, There’s a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be, explores grief as a metaphorical black hole. Could you elaborate on this idea and how it ties to the rest of the exhibition?
MG: The film started with an intuitive connection that I made between grief and black holes - the idea that both are so dense and intense that they warp time and space around their specific gravity. For me this metaphor seemed to capture some of the essential qualities of profound grief - how it consumes and transforms you, how it can feel endless and recursive, and how it shifts your perspective on the world around you, as if you’re seeing everything through a haze or warped glass.
From there I started digging into NASA images, visualizations, and sonifications of black holes, some of which are included or remixed in the film, and which also inspired the textile-based works in the show. The first parts of the film that I made are what are now parts 3 and 4; part 3 uses shapes extracted from NASA black hole visualizations to warp landscapes from Kabul and Beirut, and part 4 animates the black hole at the center of a starry galaxy to resemble a madly fibrillating heart.
The black hole as an image of absence also connected for me to other work I’ve done around issues like censorship, redaction and black sites. That connection led me to questions around memory and forgetting; grief that goes unremarked because it overflows its allotted spaces and times, or doesn’t fit neatly into the usual labels and containers; and the visible and invisible costs of war. Those are the questions that drive parts 1, 2, and 5 of the film.
Counting, Accounting, Recounting, Installation View, 2025
DG: Your textile-based works are deeply tied to memory. How did you select the materials, and what role do they play in connecting the personal and universal?
MG: The three textile-based works in the show are made on three large wooden panels that were originally part of an installation from 2006, Security Blanket. All the textiles I used are either my old clothing or other personal possessions like the blackout curtains from my old studio, and many of the garments are connected to specific memories, while also being things I don’t or can’t use anymore for their original purposes. For example, there are costumes from previous films and performances, dresses I wore to openings, an Afghan chapan that I used as a housecoat, and the scarf I wore to my uncle’s funeral. I was thinking, when I started ripping up clothes and stapling them to the first panel, about the tradition of rending garments when in mourning, and then displaying a piece of torn garment pinned to your breast, to represent the tear in your heart. As I worked on these over several months they became more sculptural and abstract and became more visually related to imagery of black holes, as I added more small holes piercing through the panels and LED lights mounted on the back. As installed, especially with the two panels in the blacked-out projection room, the panels have fabric swirling around darker depressions with subtle pinpricks of light shining through. So I suppose they work to create something like cosmic imagery from deeply specific (and humble) materials.
Death Stars 1, Fabric, latex paint, metal staples, and LED lights on panel, 2024
DG: The sculptural works made from demonetized currency are intriguing. What drew you to this material, and how does it connect to the exhibition’s exploration of value and history?
MG: I actually used both demonetized and devalued currency in the coin hamsa sculptures and paper currency collages on glass - demonetized meaning it has been officially withdrawn from circulation as legal tender, and devalued meaning that it is no longer commonly used because of inflation. For example, the Turkish lira coins I used are demonetized, while the Lebanese pound coins are devalued. In both cases, these are objects that have lost their original use value as currency, but might still have exchange value for specific communities - coin collectors, coin cutters, jewelry makers, and so on. Some coins retain value as metal scrap, while others are unworkable alloys. Paper currency has always been a kind of contract rather than an object with value per se, but because it has more surface area it has always been a richer (and more contested) canvas for the working out of national symbologies. I was interested in all of these material histories that could be drawn out from these small objects, and I wanted to incorporate them into new systems of meaning without completely removing the traces or indices of their previous, deprecated systems. So the coins were welded together into hamsa hands, which are traditionally used to ward off the evil eye - each one has a central coin that is cut into the shape of an eye. And I made collages from images I cut out from the paper currency, supplemented with some additional paper cutouts, but I sandwiched the paper between panes of glass so that you can still see both sides of the bills. All of the coins and much of the paper currency that I used in the show are from my own collection, so these pieces also form a kind of personal archive of where I’ve lived and worked over the past 25 years.
Counting, Accounting, Recounting, Installation View, 2025
Hamsa #3 Deprecated coinage and sterling silver, 13 x 5 1/2 inches (33 x 14 cm), 2024
Hamsa #2, Deprecated coinage and sterling silver, 11 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches (29.2 x 14 cm), 2024
Hamsa #4, Deprecated coinage, sterling silver, and ceramic beads, 13 x 5 1/2 inches (33 x 14 cm), 2024
DG: The exhibition spans multiple mediums—film, sculpture, and textile. How do you see these mediums interacting, and what unique possibilities does each bring?
MG: Each medium brings a different set of material histories, constraints, and possibilities with it. More obviously with the textile and currency works, as discussed above, but also in the film. For example, the first section uses scanned film negatives that I originally shot in the late 1990s, including black and white negatives that were ruined in the processing, creating abstract washes through which surface occasional fragments of legible images. Other still images used in the film were shot in the 2000s and 2010s on different DSLRs that I owned in those periods, while much of the video was shot on an iPhone, because it’s drawn from the footage I collect as part of my everyday visual note-taking. In that way, the film is also, like the textiles and currency, both an index of larger histories and a register of my own movements through the world. I hope that in the show, the works both amplify and complicate each other.
DG: Your work often involves systems, histories, and societal issues. How do these themes shape your creative process?
MG: In a lot of my lens-based work, I’m looking for spaces and moments where social, political, and cultural structures become visible. In many of my films, I use rigorous formal structures to emphasize the systems that shape individual narratives. For example, metric editing in Kabul 2, 3, 4 (2002-07), or every shot being a tracking shot in A Brief History of Collapses (2012), or the day-night-day-night structure of Smile, you’re in Sharjah (2009). In There’s a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be, part 2 of the film uses every satellite image of the Gaza Strip taken by the lo-res public Copernicus satellite between October 2023 and September 2024, and juxtaposes them with texts that I wrote based on accounts of aerial bombardment from World War I to the present. I’m pulling together a number of things in that section, including references to the ways that aerial surveillance and war have been entangled since WWI, and to the widespread deployment of both aerial surveillance and aerial bombardment in the Middle East at that time.
“To me, ‘The wound is where the light enters you.’ speaks to the necessity of remaining open to the world, no matter how piercing the pain of reckoning with loss.”
DG: The Rumi quote, “The wound is where the light enters you.” plays a key role in this exhibition. What does it mean to you, and how does it influence your work?
MG: That is really the key phrase of the video and also relates to the textile works. To me, it speaks to the necessity of remaining open to the world, no matter how piercing the pain of reckoning with loss. Black holes are, after all, born from the collapse of massive stars, and our own galaxy spins around a supermassive black hole.
DG: Looking back on your career so far, how do you think your artistic practice has changed or evolved?
MG: I’ve always worked across different mediums, but the mix has changed over the years. I rarely make interactive work these days, even though that was a fairly substantial part of my practice for the first ten years of my career. Longer-form films, including feature films, became a bigger part of my practice over the last ten years. I also think that the work has gained depth and complexity as I’ve been able to take on longer-term research projects, and it’s become more ambitious as I’ve been granted larger-scale commissions. However, I think the fundamental concerns underpinning my work remain consistent: language, loss, migration, memory, and history. And this show, which is the most personal work that I’ve made in a long time, picks up threads from earlier work in some pretty clear ways, including the recycling of installation elements and the use of images shot for my ongoing Speculations photo series.
There's a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be, Video Still, 2024
DG: What do you think the artist’s role is in addressing or combatting societal and political issues?
MG: As I’ve said before, I don’t think art alone can “combat” or solve societal and political issues; at best an artwork can be the thin end of a wedge, creating an opening through which more active players can follow. I do think that artists have a responsibility to witness, record, and transmit - not necessarily to document the evidence, but to capture the feeling of living through something terrible. While working on the show I read Cristina Rivera Garza’s book Grieving, in which she argues that one of the deliberate effects of accumulating atrocities, particularly when perpetuated against the defenseless, is that we are numbed to their horror - we become unable to feel what we should feel. For me, a poem can take me deeper into my feelings than any number of Instagram clips; I hope the film in this show does something similar.
DG: You often weave personal artifacts with cultural symbols. How do these elements interact in your work, and how do you navigate your personal history alongside broader cultural narratives?
MG: I don’t think it’s actually possible to separate personal histories from their political, social and cultural contexts - those strands are always tangled together. Much of my work, for example my 2019 feature film What We Left Unfinished or my collaboration with Chitra Ganesh on the experimental archive Index of the Disappeared, is very much concerned with that interplay between official and unofficial registers, and with the stories that circulate at the margins or in the gaps of written histories. Because of the time I’ve spent working with archives, I’m always thinking about the question of what will be preserved for the future and which parts of the past remain available to the present. Because of how I grew up, as the child of exiles from the Lebanese and Afghan civil wars, I’m acutely aware of how easy it is to lose the things, people, places, and qualities that we value, and how a twist of fate can change a memento into a document of your right to exist or a snapshot into evidence that you ever existed at all.
Counting, Accounting, Recounting, Installation View, 2025
DG: You have an upcoming screening at the MSU Broad Art Museum and are giving the keynote lecture for the symposium Aesthetics of Solidarity. The lecture is titled The Limits of Solidarity and the Collective of Grief. Has political solidarity imploded like a black hole? Does collective grief shine some light or hope into things for you?
MG: I wouldn’t say that political solidarity has imploded, but I do think that we have run up against some pretty hard limits to leftist solidarity in the past five years. The issue of Palestine is of course a massive fault line in the American Left. Afghanistan has also been a kind of limit case for leftist solidarity in the West, because no one seems to know where to place their sympathies or even where critical discourse might begin - which is a function of the more general lack of interest in and knowledge about Afghan society, culture, politics, and especially history in the US, despite the fact that it was waging war in Afghanistan for 20 years.
Having spent a year or so meditating on grief, I do think there is some political potential in sitting with our losses, really accounting for and reckoning with them, and in recognizing and valuing the pain of others. It forces a pause in cycles of retribution, which is also why it is the basis of most truth and reconciliation processes. The collectives formed by grief, some ephemeral, and some more lasting, are a bit more complicated to get into, since there isn’t always agreement on what the potential of grief should be turned towards. I think a lot about the time I spent in Times Square in 2001 holding up a sign that said “Our grief is not a cry for war,” a plea that obviously went unanswered, but I also think about some of the collectives formed around mass shootings, which have been responsible for our few, precious advances in gun control legislation, or groups like the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. Because grief is both individual and collective, specific and universal, it can be a bridge between disparate experiences: sadly, it’s a language we all speak, a language beyond words.
Mariam Ghani
Counting, Accounting, Recounting
RYAN LEE Gallery
New York
January 9—February 15, 2025
Mariam Ghani (b. 1978 New York, NY) is an artist, writer and filmmaker who examines spaces and moments where social, political and cultural structures take on visible forms. Working across video, sound, installation, photography, performance, text and dataworks, Ghani plays on the relationship between a place and its history. With a research-based approach utilizing documentary, archival, narrative and database forms, Ghani traces both individual narratives and the larger systems or structures that condition or enclose them.
Her work explores a wide range of topics including border zones, no-man’s lands, translations, transitions and the slippages where cultures intersect; security cultures, archives, architectures of democracy, and national imaginaries; places where nature and artifice imitate and influence each other; and the intersections of war, trauma, memory, identity, migration, language and loss. “I grew up very much in between cultures,” Ghani explained, “And that’s the position I work from as an artist.”
Ghani’s work has been exhibited and screened widely, including at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (2024); Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC (2023); Schneider Museum of Art, OR (2022); M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2021); Speed Museum, KY (2020); Blaffer Museum of Art, TX (2020); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY (2016); Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (2016); St. Louis Art Museum, MO (2015); and CCCB, Spain (2014); Gatchina Museum, Russia (2013); dOCUMENTA 13, Germany (2012); Museum of Modern Art (2011); Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY (2010); National Gallery of Art, DC (2008); and Tate Modern, UK (2007), among others.
Her work is in the public collections of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany; Arab American National Museum, MI; CB Richard Ellis, NY; Devi Art Foundation, India; Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, NY; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, MA; Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates; Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; and the St. Louis Art Museum, MO.
Dan Golden is a Los Angeles-based artist, designer, and creative director. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Interior Design, Fast Company, and Elle, among others. Dan’s designs have been produced by leading manufacturers, including Stephanie Odegard, Swarovski, and CB2.