Mariam Ghani

syllabi + class projects 2005-10

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PDF syllabus for Artists and Dialogue (Spring 2009) in the Art + Public Policy program at NYU / Fall 2010 revision

PDF syllabus for Video I (S09 - F10) at the Cooper Union School of Art

Online syllabus for Video I (F05 - F08) in the Stevens Art + Technology program

Online syllabus for Digital Imaging III (Fall 2008) at Stevens ARTC

Online syllabus, resource page, and class links for Intro to Media Culture and Theory (F06/S08) at Stevens ARTC

Online syllabus and resource page for Video II (S06/F07) at Stevens ARTC

Online syllabus and class links for Net Art & Design (Fall 2007) at Stevens ARTC

Editing Video in the Media Arts Center (MAC) Lab: A Quick Start PDF Guide for Stevens ARTC

Updated FCP/DVDSP quick start PDF guide for Cooper Video 1 F09

Class project and resource page from Girls-Eye-View after-school program for junior high girls at Eyebeam (Winter 2005)

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critical writing + text-based projects

You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader (a free download here) to download these documents.

Through the Screen: Notes to Permanent Transit (2002)

Appendix: Permanent Transit: net.remix statement for artwurl (2004)

Diasporic Networks & the Collaborative Construction of Identity in Kabul: Reconstructions (2004)

Towards a Visual Language of Resistance: Notes on the Disappeared (collaborative text with Chitra Ganesh for Bare Acts: The Sarai Reader 05)

Unwritten Histories and the Digital Divide: On Critics, Archives and Networks (2005)
Excerpts from an IM roundtable with Jeanette Ingberman (Exit Art), Richard Rinehart (Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, CIAO, Archiving the Avant-Garde), Beth Rosenberg (Eyebeam Atelier), and Martha Wilson (Franklin Furnace Archives), July 2005. Moderated by Mariam Ghani for Arts + Leisure, a tabloid newspaper on art, criticality and complaint, published by e-flux and Art in General. A longer selection of excerpts from the roundtable appears here than in the published text.

Divining the Question: An Unscientific Methodology for the Collection of Warm Data (2006)
Essay written for issue Viralzerosix of Viralnet, the online journal published by the Center for Integrated Media at CalArts.
Updated version with excerpts from Points of Proof postcards and Polaroids prepared for the Conversation Pieces exhibition reader in 2009.

Writing Politics on Your Flesh (2006)
PDF download of an interview with Tom Leeser and Beth Rosenberg for Viralnet, conducted in spring 2005 and published in spring 2006.

Afghanistan: Between the Tiger and the Precipice (2007)
"News-collage" article commissioned for the 25th anniversary issue of FUSE, Cultural Change in Real Terms.

Kabul: Constitutions: Annotated Guide to the Interactive Map (2008)
A 21-page text that serves as a guide to both the web-based and installation versions of the interactive map that is the heart of the project Kabul: Constitutions. A booklet with this text and photographs of the installation process by Rick Vogels was produced by Gemak when the Kabul project was exhibited there in February 2008.

New World Borders (2008)
Essay and "corrective redaction" project commissioned from Index of the Disappeared as a contribution to the newspaper Common Possibility, produced for the exhibition How to Talk About Utopia Without Saying Utopia (a project by Anthony Marcellini +Matthew David Rana) and distributed in San Francisco in April 2008.

Bidoun Questionnaire (2009)
Questionnaire sent by Bidoun, editors of the Sharjah Biennial 9 catalogue project (three books in total), to artists in the Provisions for the Future exhibition, several months before we produced our projects. Erin and I describe our goals for the new video that SB9 commissioned in alternating blue (EEK) and green (MG) handwriting. This version was published along with a partial shooting script in the first Provisions catalogue, which focuses on the production process.

The Trespassers: FAQ, Notes, Interview, Transcripts (2011)
Includes an interview with Chitra Ganesh for the Sharjah Biennial X catalogue, source notes for the documents used in the Trespassers video, English-language transcripts of all the portions of documents 'read' onscreen by the magnifying glass in the video and translated offscreen by the Arabic and Dari translators, and an FAQ presented in the installation.

Introduction to an Index (2011)
Collaborative text and print project with Chitra Ganesh, commissioned from Index of the Disappeared for the 30th anniversary issue of the Radical History Review. Presents a condensed history of the Index archive and research through layered and annotated images constructed from materials in the archive.

Afghanistan: A Lexicon (2011)
A non-linear, speculative history of 20th-century Afghanistan told through definitions of 71 terms, most paired with original or archival images. Co-authored with anthropologist Ashraf Ghani for dOCUMENTA (13)'s 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts series, published as a 48-page book in a 2500-copy print run / unlimited e-book run by Hatje Cantz in spring 2011. Available from the publisher and all major online retailers. A series of excerpts from the Lexicon was also published on the New York Review of Books blog in September 2012.

The House of Histories (2012)
An essay about the 1996 film The House of History, directed by longtime Afghan Films cameraman Qader Taheri, and including footage filmed by eight different Afghan Films cameramen between 1991 and 1996. Written for the Asian Pacific American Institute's Making the Memory Sacred blog during my year as a Visiting Scholar at A/P/A.

Filming the Many Afghanistans (2013)
Essay about the jeshn films in the first batch of films digitized from the Afghan Films archive during the digitization project launched by myself and pad.ma during dOCUMENTA (13). Commissioned by Creative Time Reports and co-published by the New York Review of Books blog.

Artist Statement (2010)

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recently, now, + soon:

*Upcoming screenings: Afghan Films clip-video at the ciné[mac] in Marseilles in July and August, as part of the European Capital of Culture exhibition Le Pont.
*Current exhibitions: From April 11th to June 1st, 2013, a special version of Landscape Studies: New Mexico in the public projections series Psychic Geographies (also featuring work by Basma Alsharif, Jackie Goss, Michael Robinson and Sayler/Morris) at the Urban Video Project in Syracuse; opening April 26th, the Biennale Online, organized by Jan Hoet.
*The Guantanamo Effect, Index of the Disappeared's new web project for Creative Time Reports, has been cross-posted to Alternet.
*The Art Asia Pacific blog has republished my essay for the NY Review of Books blog about the jeshn films in the first batch of films digitized from the Afghan Films archive as a result of the project started with pad.ma last spring. An earlier essay about the 1996 film The House of History can be found here.
*My notebook for dOCUMENTA (13), Afghanistan: A Lexicon, is available as a print and e-book from Hatje Cantz and other retailers. A series of excerpts from the Lexicon was also published on the NYRblog.
*I'm now on Twitter and Vimeo.

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Bio:
Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer and teacher based in Brooklyn. Her research-based practice operates at the intersections between place, memory, history, language, loss, and reconstruction. She has been awarded the NYFA and Soros Fellowships, grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, CEC ArtsLink, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Experimental Television Center, and residencies at LMCC, Eyebeam Atelier, Smack Mellon, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. Her work in video, installation and photography has been exhibited and screened internationally, including at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel and Kabul, the Sharjah Biennials 9 and 10, the 2005 Liverpool Biennial, the Beijing 798 Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the National Gallery in DC, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH: DOX in Copenhagen, transmediale in Berlin, Futura in Prague, Curtacinema in Rio de Janeiro, EMAP in Seoul, d/Art in Sydney, and Bodhi Art in Mumbai. Her public and participatory projects have been commissioned by Creative Time in New York, CEPA in Buffalo, the Arab American National Museum in Detroit, Visual Correspondents in Berlin and Amsterdam, and Turbulence, artwurl, and the Longwood Digital Matrix online. Her critical writing on disappearance, warm data, spatial politics and poetics, film and video, and networked archives has been featured in Mousse, Abitare, Filmmaker, the New York Review of Books blog, FUSE, Viralnet, Pavilion, the Sarai Reader 05, Samar, the Radical History Review, the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and the artist newspapers Common Possibilities and Arts and Leisure. Ghani also lectures widely and organizes/moderates exhibitions, workshops, and discussions. She has a B.A. in Comparative Literature from NYU and an MFA in Photography, Video + Related Media from SVA, and has taught at Cooper Union, Parsons, the Art & Tech program at Stevens, the Public Practice program at Otis, and NYU's Art + Public Policy program. She is currently a visiting scholar at NYU's Asian Pacific American Institute.

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