Born in New York in 1978, Mariam Ghani graduated with a BA in comparative literature from New York University in 2000, and an MFA in photography, video, and related media from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2002. The daughter of a Lebanese mother and an Afghan father, Ghani grew up in exile and was unable to travel to Afghanistan until 2002. An artist working in installation, performance, photography, text, and video, she is also an activist, archivist, writer, and lecturer. Since 2004, Ghani has collaborated with artist Chitra Ganesh on Index of the Disappeared, an experimental archive of renditions, redactions, detentions, and deportations that chronicles the human cost of the United States’ post-9/11 national security and foreign policy. The project is both a physical and digital archive, which circulates in different forms to different audiences, and a flexible platform for visual, poetic, and theoretical interventions in public spaces and dialogues. Ghani has also made films including Like Water From a Stone (2014), which considers the impact of the discovery of oil on Norway, and The Trespassers (2011), which examines problems of translation. Ghani’s two-channel video installation A Brief History of Collapses (2012) focuses on aesthetic similarities between the Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (built in 1779), and Dar ul-Aman Palace in Kabul (built in 1929), as a way to explore their overlapping contexts and functions. In Ghani’s work, the buildings represent both the expression of societal idealism and that impulse’s ultimate transformation or defeat. Juxtaposed, the Fridericianum, now restored, and Dar ul-Aman, which remains a ruin, seem to suggest possible pasts or futures for one another. Two cameras track through the paired structures in pursuit of elusive figures, while a voiceover winds back and forth from building to building, past to present, history to myth. Ghani has had solo exhibitions at the State Museum Gatchina Palace and Park, Russia (2013); Rogaland Kunstsenter, Stavanger, Norway (2014); Saint Louis Art Museum (2015); Indianapolis Museum of Art (2015–16); and Queens Museum of Art (2016). She has taken part in group exhibitions including Open House: Working in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum of Art (2004); In/Visible: Contemporary Art by Arab-American Artists, Arab American National Museum, Dearborn, Michigan (2005); Democracy in America, organized by Creative Time at the Park Avenue Armory, New York (2008); Between Heaven and Earth, Calvert 22, London (2011); Acts of Voicing, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2012) and Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (2013); and Utopian Pulse: Flares in the Darkroom, Secession, Vienna (2014) and MOCAK, Kraków, Poland (2016). She participated in the Liverpool Biennial (2004); Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2009 and 2011); Documenta, Kassel, Germany (2012); the parallel programs of the Gwangju Biennial: Burning Down the House, Gwangju, South Korea (2014) and Manifesta 10 (2014); and the Dhaka Art Summit (2016). Her films have been screened at transmediale, Berlin (2003); CPH:DOX, Copenhagen (2004, 2012); the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2008); Museum of Modern art, New York (2011); and Rotterdam Film Festival (2013). Ghani lives and works in New York.