Kabul:Reconstructions

Mariam Ghani was born in New York in 1978 to an Afghan father and Lebanese mother. In her practice as a media artist she uses her multiple identities to position herself as a translator, revealing channels of communication between cultures that consider themselves foreign to each other by investigating places, people, moments and ideas (often implicated within her own family history but estranged from her by time, distance or language) that inhabit, embody, or create the border zones where those cultures intersect. In the past, these acts of translation have taken several different shapes, many of which have incorporated experimentation with database forms, and all of which are profoundly motivated by a consideration of the sites from which she practices.

Her most recent project is the Kabul: Reconstructions (2003), a three-channel video, installation, collaborative weblog (www.kabul-reconstructions.net), produced with students from the AINA Afghan Media Center in Kabul), and public dialogue performance about the reconstruction of the city of Kabul, which included the setting up a replica of a UNHCR-issue refugee tent inside a gallery and serving visitors tea and World Food Programme biscuits while answering their questions about Afghanistan.

Kabul:Reconstructions is a video installation and public dialogue project that explores the many different meanings and reasons of the idea of reconstruction in the context of the city of Kabul. These include its use in bureaucratic jargon to refer to large-scale social and economic redevelopment projects, which are set up by government agencies and NGOs with the intent of altering the infrastructure of the country's administration, production and regulation; its local translation into the literal renovations and new constructions undertaken by individuals as they seek to rebuild the physical city; and for those of us who are Afghans outside Afghanistan, its significance as the process by which we piece together an image of this place and these people from the scraps of information assembled through mass media transmissions, the memories preserved in expatriate family stories and traditions, and personal communications from friends and family on the inside.

The web-based component of Kabul:Reconstructions is intended to open up to the general public some of those private lines of insider-outsider communication, and the special kinds of information they carry, by creating an online audiovisual resource for information on and forum for discussion about the reconstruction among a group of invited participants from the Afghan and Afghan-American communities both inside and outside Kabul. www.kabul-reconstructions.net/ask is also a vehicle for the transmission of questions -- which all site visitors are invited to submit -- through the agency of the participants to Kabul itself, where they may then find their answers in images, articles, sounds or stories carried back to the site and added to the source.

Anyone with a question about the reconstruction of Kabul or its context in the current situation or history of Afghanistan is invited to submit their question online. Your question will then be transmitted to Kabul by Mariam and the other weblog participants, who will do their best to bring your answer back to the site within two weeks.

Questions submitted before December 10th, 2003 will help determine what footage will be shot and then add to the site during her trip to Kabul this winter, one year after her first visit. To submit your question, go to http://www.kabul-reconstructions.net and click on ASK A QUESTION.

Note that you can continue to access the audiovisual blogger and discussion forum section of the site -- which is updated continually, with new participants coming soon -- by clicking on FOLLOW THE INFORMATION on the main page.

Kabul:Reconstructions was created by media artist Mariam Ghani with the collaboration of programmer Edward Potter, the AINA Afghan Media Center in Kabul, and Exit Art in New York.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Once I become interested in a particular idea, I start a project by beginning to amass a collection of a certain kind of image, sound, object, story, action, footage or bit of data that seems to cluster around that idea, and then I develop a loose set of principles (e.g. thematic and/or formal hierarchies and rhythmic rules) by which the collection can be navigated/edited. My works often respond to specific places or journeys, so when they are viewed in a gallery context it is important to me to create an installation around the work that negotiates a space for viewing somewhere in between the place that motivated the work’s creation and the site to which it has now been transposed. Most of my projects also respond to and reflect specific political, social and cultural realities (about which they seek to provoke questions rather than provide answers) and so sometimes one natural outgrowth of a video project is a public dialogue component that gives viewers information and the chance to engage in debate about the larger context of the piece, either in a live interaction with me and each other or via a web-based exchange. The performances within the videos, in contrast, are private rituals that I enact for the camera alone, usually in my own home, and represent my most direct address of the difficulties inherent in my (both inherited and self-assigned) task as the translator between cultures that often conflict, as well as literalizations of a familiar feminist and post-colonial trope: offering up my own body as a bridge across those border zones still littered with unexploded mines.

Mariam Ghani's Previous Works:
Parallel Frames: Selected Shorts, (2000-02)
The four pieces on this tape are part of an ongoing series called Parallel Frames, in which Mariam combines documentary footage with performance, appropriation and digital manipulation in order to evoke parallels between cataclysmic political events in other places and times and mundane occurrences at home.

Universal Games (2000, 2:20) manipulates footage from one week of New York network TV news in October of 2000, when the two top stories were the Subway Series (the Yankees-Mets World Series of baseball) and the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (the Al-Aqsa Intifada), in order to expose the strange similarity in the way our media outlets report stories of wildly varying gravity. Originally installed with 43” x 96” sheets of graphically patterned black-and-white wallpaper made from the same images.

Armenia dreams gasoline (2001, 3:00)
The rural highways of Armenia are lined with a bizarre proliferation of near-empty, brand-new neon gas stations, whose ubiquity is made all the more mysterious by the observable fact that most Armenians still buy their gasoline from the backs of illegal vendors’ trucks. In this video they are juxtaposed with a tableau enacted on the Yerevan Steps, which would have stretched from the central plaza of the city to the World War II monument on the hill above it if the fall of the Soviet Union had not halted the construction and left both steps up and steps down suspended over a void of air. Originally part of a two-channel installation with the video Progress (2002, 14:00), which documents the upward climb of a dangerously rickety chair-lift excursion on an Armenian mountainside.

Blind Crossing (2000, 2:50) uses text from Middle Passages, a book by the Caribbean poet and theorist Kamau Braithwaite, to defamiliarize imagery of the harbor by Chelsea Piers and summon the specter of forced migration in contemporary New York. Originally part of a two-channel installation with the video Crossing Blind (2000, 3:00), which uses the actions of a group of blindfolded performers to draw the same parallel with the lines and signals of pedestrian traffic systems.

Beirut Nocturne (2001, 3:40) sketches from the vantage point of my grandmother’s apartment the city of Beirut -- where for a generation that lived through the shattering civil war, celebratory fireworks will always have a faint echo of bombs.

Mariam Ghani received a B.A. summa cum laude with honors in Comparative Literature from NYU in 2000, where she was awarded the Acton Scholarship and the Dean's Undergraduate Research Grant, and an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in 2002, where she was awarded the Aaron Siskind Memorial Scholarship. Mariam was a Paul & Daisy Soros New Americans Fellow from 2000-02 and a Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace from 2002-03, and is currently a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Artist in Residence at the Woolworth Building. She has exhibited my work nationally and internationally since 1999, including recent screenings at the New York Video Festival, the Asia Society, the Boston Center for the Arts, the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, Remote Lounge, and transmediale.03 in Berlin; site-specific installations at Talwar Gallery, Judson Church, Exit Art and the Bronx Museum of the Arts; and artist talks and lectures at NYU's Kevorkian Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Center for Media and Culture, the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University, Hunter College, and the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art in Yerevan. Upcoming screenings and projects include the Canal Street Projection Project in New Orleans, the Smart Project Space in Amsterdam, the 13a Mostra Curtacinema in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Open House at the Brooklyn Museum.

Mariam Ghani can be contacted at: ghanimaria@hotmail.com