Revealing the Unseen: Mariam GhaniWords: David Alm

Photo: Chris Jones

Even the most humanistic political artists can lose sight of the personal when dealing with the abstract. Mariam Ghaniis the exception. Heady and compelling, the Brooklyn artist's film, installation and Web projects address timely issueslike immigration, diaspora and the reconstruction of her father?s native Afghanistan (her mother is Lebanese). Heropen-ended, Web-based work, How Do You See the Disappeared?, presents what she calls "warm data," theunquantifiable pieces of information that define a human being, on émigrés seeking political asylum in the U.S.Through questions like "Who was your first love?" and "What do you see when you close your eyes?" Ghani developsabstract yet intimate portraits that privilege subjectivity and experience over hard facts. Thus her subjects' humanitytranscends the "cold data" that otherwise define them within legal and bureaucratic systems. At 26, Ghani is rising fastin the New York art world, surprisingly for someone who once planned on teaching comparative literature. Aftergraduating from NYU, Ghani changed course to study video art and film at SVA, receiving her MFA in 2002. Sincethen she has shown in some of New York's preeminent galleries, film venues and museums; last year she was an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam, where she begins teaching this summer. Ghani's academic training gives her an intellectualbreadth rare in young artists. "I still have a very literary approach," she notes, citing the influence of late theoristEdward Said -- particularly his notion of contrapuntal narratives. "I'm primarily interested in how history is narratedand the terms of that narration." For Ghani the work is urgent: "It's the burden of Sheherazade," she says, referring tothe Arabian folk tale of a young woman who told her king one story a night for 1,001 nights to avoid execution. "It'sabout telling stories in order to stay alive."

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Points of Proof, 2005, by Mariam Ghani (©Miriam Ghani).

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Home > Shington-report.org > Archives > August_2005 > IN/VISIBLE Art Exhibition Inaugurates ArabAmerican National Museum

Washington Report, August 2005, pages 50-51

Special Report

IN/VISIBLE Art Exhibition Inaugurates ArabAmerican National Museum

By Maymanah Farhat

SINCE ITS inauguration in earlyMay, the Arab AmericanNational Museum has hostedevents that aim to educate thecommunity on the impact andcontributions of Arab Americansthroughout American history.The May 19 opening of the artexhibition IN/VISIBLE andthree-day symposium on “Exploring New Forms andMeanings: the Intersection ofAudience, Ideas and Art”exemplified the museum’sdedication to providing outletsthrough which Arab Americanscan convey their identity andexperiences to the greatercommunity.

Currently on display until Oct.30, IN/VISIBLE is an inspiringshowcase of art by first- and second-generation Arab Americans. The first of its kind, the exhibitfeatures the works of Yasser Aggour, Rheim Alkadhi, Doris Bittar, Abdelali Dahrouch, MariamGhani, John Halaka, Nabila Hilmi, Emily Jacir, Mohammad O. Khalil, Amina Mansour, SumayyahSamaha, Athir Shayota, Helen Zughaib and Afaf Zurayk. Together, their pieces successfullycommunicate the realities and concerns of Arab Americans, while defying media stereotypes thatcontinue to suppress the Arab-American voice.

The IN/VISIBLE artists employ a range of media—including film, drawing, mixed media, painting,photography, poetry and sculpture—and provide individual reflections on such issues as family,love, immigration, globalization, war, political conflict and identity.

The opening of IN/VISIBLE corresponded with theart symposium designed to initiate dialoguebetween Arab-American artists, scholars and thecommunity. The art exhibit, panel discussions,art presentations and film screenings all werepart of the May 19-21 event that inspireddiscussions concerning the effectiveness of art onthe greater community and the exploration ofidentity and experience.

The works included in the exhibit are diverse inappearance and media, yet all are thought-provoking. Each artist engages the viewer withjourneys of identifying the past, whilecommunicating one’s identity and looking to thefuture. IN/VISIBLE projects a universality that iscommunicated through each piece through an

Doris Bittar’s Why We Are Like Our Parents,Mama & Me, Lebanon 1960 (©Doris Bittar2004).

Helen Zughaib’s Prayer Rug forAmerica (©Helen Zughaib).

communicated through each piece through anexamination of various aspects of the humancondition.

Artist Mariam Ghani explores issues of identity inPoints of Proof, 2005, a video, Web site andmixed media installation based on a database

generated by a single question: “If someone questioned your right to call yourself an American,what is the one story, object, image or document you would offer as your proof?” The result is afascinating array of responses by Arabs and Arab Americans in the Detroit area. Through Ghani’spiece, we are given a glance into the difficulties faced when one’s nationality is consistentlyquestioned. Points of Proof offers an often-silenced community the opportunity to define itselfduring this critical point in history.

In her painting, Prayer Rug for America, 2001, HelenZughaib further explores such issues of nationality andidentity through the depiction of a Muslim prayer rugwhich uses the influence of traditional Islamic mosaicsand American flags to challenge the viewer’s perceptionsof what it means to be Arab, American or Muslim. Thesynthesis of the two recognizable symbols of cultureforces the viewer to explore his or her own thoughts onunderstanding and tolerance during these difficult post-9/11 times. Upon closer assessment of the piece, theviewer is captivated by a riveting question that was alsoexplored in Ghani’s Points of Proof—what does it mean tobe Arab American?

Both Ghani’s and Zughaib’s work are excellent examplesof how Arab-American artists have been instrumental innegotiating the difficulties of living between two cultures.The works included in IN/VISIBLE challenge the so-called “borders” that lie between minority and immigrantcommunities and mainstream American society. Throughtheir work, the artists of IN/VISIBLE affirm that fixedcultural borders no longer suffice to define many first-and second-generation Americans.

Such fusion of cultures is combined with examinations ofthe artist and individual in the context of this imperative moment in history. Thus, IN/VISIBLE isan historical event not only for Arab-American artists, but for the greater community as well.The artists of IN/VISIBLE provide us with a better understanding of a community that has longbeen silenced. Through their works we are moved by the need for the continuous articulation ofexperiences and realities of a people that have remained invisible for far too long.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog, IN/VISIBLE: Contemporary Art by Arab Americans,edited by curator Salwa Mikdadi, available for purchase from the Museum gift shop. For furtherinformation on the exhibition contact the Arab American National Museum, 13624 Michigan Ave.,Dearborn, MI 48126, (312) 582-AANM (2266). For more information on the artists whoparticipated in IN/VISIBLE e-mail <curator222-aanm@yahoo.com>.

Maymanah Farhat is a California-based free-lance writer and researcher of visual arts.

Home > Shington-report.org > Archives > August_2005 > IN/VISIBLE Art Exhibition Inaugurates ArabAmerican National Museum

Mariam Ghani, a Brooklyn-based new mediaartist. (photo courtesy of Ghani)

Tell Me More AboutMembership

October 2005

Piecing It Together Storytelling in the Digital AgeBy David Alm

Shortly after Jean-Luc Godardreleased Breathless in1960, anexasperated journalist said to theyoung director: “Surely you thinkthat a film should have a beginning,middle, and end.”

“Yes,” Godard replied after amoment, “but not necessarily in thatorder.” Those words not onlylaunched the French New Wave buthave since inspired thousands ofyoung directors to reject traditional

plot devices.

Now, for better or for worse, Godard’s enigmatic response has become evenfurther complicated by the increasingly pervasive use of digital technology—whichmay be the demise of storytelling as we know it. With interactive websites andDVDs, TiVo, and elaborate computer games, the art of patiently allowing a tale tounfold is starting to seem antiquated.

According to Marcia Zellers, director of the Digital Content Lab at the AmericanFilm Institute in Los Angeles, whether or not these new technologies willfundamentally change our concept of “story” is “the toughest nut to crack. Wehaven’t really figured that out yet.”

The Digital Content Lab was established in the late 1990s to prepare for the so-called “digital revolution” and to insure that new technologies advanced—ratherthan hindered—the art of storytelling. “Our primary mission here is to be thetorchbearers for great entertainment,” Zellers says. “And to make sure there is avoice for storytellers in the digital world. But in the digital world, all aspects of thebusiness—from technology to business to creative—are all so complexlyinterwoven that we have a lot of dialogue around all those things.”

The transformation caused by this digital revolution will, according to Zellers, be farmore complicated than any that have come before. “When films went from silent totalkie, the revolution happened in one night, it happened one time, and everyonehad to figure out how to deal with it.” The digital revolution, on the other hand, hasbeen developing for 20 years. “It’s going to be sort of a slow rollover, but I thinkthe eventual impact on our society is probably going to be a lot more profoundthan when movies went from black and white to color, or when we went from radioto television.”

Major changes include the disempowerment of big TV networks and studios thatmonopolize the airwaves. “For many years a lot of us were operating under theassumption that because television was the dominant medium, the televisionmonitor would be the place where we’d first see widespread interactivity,” shesays. “And as years went by, it became clear that that’s not necessarily the case.”

Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker, founding partners of The Center for NewAmerican Media, a New York-based documentary production studio known forirreverent but socially minded TV documentaries like American Tongues (1987) andPeople Like Us: Social Class in America (2001), were among the first to explorethe possibilities of interactive TV—and to realize its limitations: You can only havetwo font sizes, your project has to be compatible with multiple cable providers, andyou have to assume that most people don’t have a TV with a keyboard attached toit.

“With interactive television, you have to do a version that works for the people whohave interactivity, but then you also have to do a version for the people who don’t,”Alvarez notes. “And they’re all watching the same broadcast. If it goes on at 8pmon Wednesday night, and my mother has her old 15-inch set, she’s got to be able

David Alm is a freelance journalist, editor,and teacher. He has a master’s degreefrom the University of Chicago, where hestudied film history and theory. He haspublished widely on contemporary art, film,and design in magazines such asAmerican Artist Watercolor, Artbyte,Camerawork , RES, Silicon Alley Reporter ,Time Out, SOMA, and The Utne Reader.This year he helped Hillman Curtis writeCreating Short Films for the Web, to bepublished in the fall by Peach Pit Press.He has also taught film history and writingat the college level and assisted in makingseveral short and documentary films. Helives in Brooklyn, New York.

to watch the film, and it has to make sense to her. But then my brother, who’s Mr.Early Adopter, wants to get the interactive stuff going—and he’s watching the samefilm. If we have all this interactive stuff on the screen impeding on the regular film,no one’s going to have the experience of just watching the film.”

Most digital content producers, however, are bypassing this problem by developingcontent for cell phones, computers, PDAs—media that exists in a morecustomized, personal space. With such individualized programming, the socialcurrency that film and television provide could be lost and viewing could become athoroughly isolating activity. But this issue seems to be less important than themore immediate financial ramifications. “The bottom line is the bottom line,” saysTim Shey, co-founder of Proteus, an interactive media development firm based inWashington, D.C. “It’s absolutely revenue, the return on your investment. Andthere’s no mistaking that the mainstream networks and content producers arelooking at digital media as a means to improve and sustain their business. They’reseeing the fragmentation of their audience and the big three networks aren’t thebig three networks anymore. They’re still the most watched channels, but they’vealso seen an erosion of their audiences because of things like cable, the internet,and games. So they see it as almost essential to their ongoing business.”

Moreover, when users are able to interact with and even manipulate digitalprogramming, the very distinction between creation and consumption becomesfuzzier—and may eventually be altogether moot.

Take Machinima, a growing trend among gamers in which people manipulate videogames to create short films, using the game itself as raw material for charactersand sets. Players around the world can collaborate on a project: One person maycontrol the “camera angles,” another may write the script, and another may do thecasting. The results can be anywhere from silly to ingenious. In one Machinima-made movie, two soldiers in full combat gear from the game Halo engage in along, philosophical debate à la My Dinner with Andre (1981). In another, the videogame version of The Matrix is used to create new sequels for the original film—humorously, of course.

“Who creates these stories?” Shey asks. “Is it the game designers, just by creatingthat universe and those capabilities? Or is it the players/auteurs who are findingnew ways of using that technology? [Players] have this almost unprecedentedopportunity. They’ve got this virtual world they can go into, they’ve got actors,they’ve got camera angles. One of them can jump up onto the top of a jeep andyou can have a shot looking down. It’s almost hard to explain unless you canactually see it, and that’s happening to a lot of the virtual worlds that are out therenow.”

But who is the author in this digital age, and will those who were previouslyrevered for their ability to weave a brilliant yarn be replaced by anyone withbroadband and a cell phone?

“I think the reverence for auteurship is always going to be with us,” Zellers says. “Itgoes back to the desire to be told a great story. If we could all do it, there’d be nodesire to revere those folks. It’s a unique and special talent just like any uniqueand special talent.”

She adds that digital media simply opens the playing field to other players and,therefore, to new kinds of stories. “[Auteur-driven content] is just going to besupplemented by other things,” she says. “So probably the person who has thegreatest talent for weaving a well-crafted story will always remain at the top of theheap in terms of people’s reverence, but other people who figure out how to doreally interesting things with these new media, and who figure out ways to createnew experiences and new buzz words and new things that enter the lexicon, willbe revered for different reasons.”

One analogy might be Turntablism: the art of scratching records to create radicallynew sounds and rhythms from other people’s music. Scratching has plenty ofdetractors, and surely trends like Machinima will too as they become morewidespread. But what major artistic development hasn’t known its share ofdissent?

“People have been proclaiming the death of the novel and the death of filmpractically since they were invented,” Shey reminds us. “But I think there willalways be a place for the novel or film as we know them.” He quickly adds that so-called “new media” do not necessarily avail revolutionary new ways of telling astory. “It’s nothing new for media to be intertextual or interactive,” he says. “A lot ofthe best novels require a great deal of user-participation, or user-interpretation.And a lot of people will say that novels exist somewhere between what’s on thepage and the imagination of the person reading it. The same can be said for agood movie or television show.”

The big difference, he adds, is that “[digital storytelling] can be much moreimmersing, and it can involve the viewer or the reader so much more. And thereare a lot more possibilities once you add that element of network, community,connectivity.”

This may be true. After all, digital media allow niche markets across the globe tomeet in virtual environments in real time, which could increase democratic content

and mitigate isolation (albeit through chat rooms and instant-message discussions,not over a cup of coffee near your local cinema).

Of course, whether they work in digital or more traditional media, not all storytellersare commercially driven. Digital technology also facilitates new forms of art-making, allowing artists to explore narrative strategies in unprecedented ways.Mariam Ghani, a Brooklyn-based new media artist whose projects oftenincorporate video, websites, museum installations, reading libraries, and even chat-room discussions with the artist, examines the very concepts of “narration” and “reception” at a fundamental level.

“I tend to think of the raw material of my stories as a database, and the differentways that I present it as a set of interfaces that offer different entry points into thematerial for different audiences,” Ghani says. She invests her audiences withconsiderable authorial control, thereby diminishing her own role as “director.”

“When I first began working with video, I came to it from the tradition ofexperimental documentary, which seems very much inflected by the ‘I’ of thefilmmaker,” says Ghani, who received her MFA in photography, video and relatedmedia from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. “But as I moved into the artworld, and shifted into a practice that’s grounded more and more in new media, Ibecame less interested in making work that reflects my life or my stories, and moreinterested in making projects where I give voice to the stories of others—creatingsystems for people to speak, or translating their speech into mediums or siteswhere they are usually voiceless.”

She adds, however, that even this is not entirely in her control. “It’s actually up tothe viewers how much narrative agency they want to appropriate for themselves,”she says.

It really becomes an individual choice,” explains Ghani, summing up one of thepivotal points in the digital storytelling discussion. “Will you engage, or will you bejust an observer?”

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Artists Seek To Fill 9/11 VoidsNEW YORK, Sept. 12, 2005

(CBS) By CBSNews.com's Christine Lagorio.

On the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks this weekend, New York City memorialized victims by ringing a bell at Ground Zero,reading names of the dead and offering countless prayer services — just as it did last year and the year before that. But a newcavern of remembrance appears to be opening up as the public continues to heal and art influenced by Sept. 11, 2001, is steamingout.

Galleries and museums in Lower Manhattan are opening to the public what seems to be the first major outpouring of 9/11-inspiredprint and performance art.

Much of this outpouring can be attributed to the artistic community built by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a nonprofit arts-funding group that was housed in the World Trade Center and lost one of its artists when the towers collapsed. To rekindle memoryand awaken ideas this year, the council hosted an arts summit over the Sept. 11 weekend and opened art shows in several majorexhibition spaces. "There are many ways of remembering a day — the reading of names, tributes, those are all important ways — but there arecultural ways that make us remember and reflect enough to work to make sure history doesn’t repeat," Radhika Subramanian,director of cultural programs for the center, told CBSNews.com. Subramanian organized the weekend summit of more than 60artists and cultural leaders.

One of those featured in the center’s exhibit "What Comes After: Cities, Art and Recovery" is performance artist Pia Lindman. Fouryears ago, on Sept. 11, 2001, Lindman saw from Lower Manhattan the horror of towering flames and mass death after terroristsflew planes into the World Trade Center. The attack played out like a movie, but then 9/11 ripped into her life.

Lindman, a downtown New York resident, was told hours after the attack that she would not be able to return to her apartment —indefinitely. As an evacuee who lost a colleague that day, Lindman knew 9/11 was affecting her life, and would, therefore, affecther art.

So did singer Athena Masci.

"Of course 9/11 affected me heavily," Masci said after performing a song she wrote about the psychological stresses encounteredby Iraq war soldiers. She performed as part of the September 11 Musical Celebration. "I think any artist living in New York thenwould say the same."

Lindman’s Sunday performance was, like Masci’s, not a reflection on the terrorist attacks as a singular event, but rather a commenton what she sees as global political and social repercussions of 9/11.

"Nothing has stopped. Suffering and trauma have not stopped," Lindman said. "The repercussions of 9/11 are so much greaterthan just that day, and they affect all parts of the world — some much more than we feel here in New York."

Lindman, who was born in Finland, said she was inspired to trace newspaper images of mourning by the facial and bodilyexpressions of Ground Zero visitors that she observed. Using her sketchbook as a guide during performances, Lindman poses herbody into likenesses of mourners.

Another performance piece the cultural center exhibited is a bulky and eerily official-looking collection of wearable emergencysupplies by Peggy Diggs. When worn (she paraded the outfit past Ground Zero), it resembles a mesh firefighter’s outfit with dozensof pockets.

Other spaces drawing attention to artists’ reflection on 9/11 include Apex Art, a downtown gallery featuring an exhibit inspired bysigns and language found immediately after 9/11, and Cooper Union, which, along with another museum, is showing a largecollection of art previously investigated or confiscated by the FBI.

This sort of exhibit shows that 9/11 has left not only emotional scars that inspire expressive art, but also sweeping social ones thancan prompt reactionary art shows. But the social changes extend far beyond the art community: Most Americans, from bankers tofarmers, see terror as a way of life in the United States, a CBS News poll has found. Seventy-nine percent of those surveyed saidthey expect Americans will always have to live with the threat of terrorism.

That’s true for citizens of other countries, too, said Lindman, who performs poses from photographs taken all over the world.

The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council show featured New York-based artists who consider themselves multi-national. ConorMcGrady, a Brooklyn-based artist who was born in Ireland, made a series of black-and-white barebones illustrations of structures.Although none of the sketches resembles the World Trade Center, they remind viewers of public surveillance and of structure: whatmakes a building stand up.

Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani, two collaborating artists who also showed work on Sept. 11, 2005, said their inspiration camefrom the government’s detention of suspected terrorists — and from their thought that the Immigration and Naturalization Servicewrongfully netted and detained hundreds of immigrants in the wake of 9/11. When the INS released a list of detainees to complywith a Freedom of Information Act request, it was so heavily redacted that "there was nothing left but blank space," Ghani said."These people had been erased. So I felt something else needed to be created out of that."

From where Ghani spoke in a Lower Manhattan performance space, another void – one that four years later has inspired countlessartists to create – could be seen out the window.

By Christine Lagorio©MMV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Kye Ryoon HanAh-Nie, 2004DVD, total run time 4:20Courtesy Korean CulturalService.

New York“Moving Time: Nam June Paik + 30 International Video Artists”Korean Cultural Service

New York’s Korean Cultural Service launched its 2006 program with “Moving Time,” an inquiry into the role of time, both as a naturaltheme of video art as well as one of its constituent parameters. A three-part show of 30 international artists working in video, eachsegment includes work by pioneering media artist Nam June Paik. Upon Paik’s death midway through the show, it became his lastas a living artist.

The artist’s final exit in the midst of “Moving Time” felt oddly serendipitous: it served as an ultimate conferral of poignancy onto acollection of works by precisely the sort of emerging artists to whom Paik dedicated his career as both peer and teacher.

Among the more explicit and visually arresting treatments of time from the other participants, Stream (2003), one of two videos bymultimedia and installation artist Hong Buhm, records Buhm’s journey from his studio to the subway. It unfolds in 25 channels ofuniform size, each delayed by three seconds, collectively producing a rhythmic audiovisual progression of memory, symphonic ineffect.

The chain of bouncing, fidgeting heads in Kye Ryoon Han’s Ah-Nie (2004) follows in a similar, if more playful vein, while Jaye Rhee’smultichannel Going Places (2005) takes a frenetically fun approach to defamiliarization, presenting a scaled-down human figurenavigating a mass of rhizome-like balloons in jerky, bee-like movements. This shared comical quality reflects progenitor Paik’stongue-in-cheek sensibility, epitomized by the leering smiles and bright pop colors lifted from Japanese television advertising in hismedia mash-up, Global Groove (1978).

Contributions by 19 artists from outside Korea underscore Paik’s international impact. Chinese artist Shiying Vicki Yang’s Play in Red(2005) explores the transmission of stories of Cultural Revolution experiences to a younger Chinese generation. Afghan artist MariamGhani probes television’s subversion of history’s violence through an endless and willfully dreamlike cycle of repetitive domesticbanality in The Glass House Home Movies (2001-03). More palatable, though no less disturbing, is Mayumi Kimura’s Amnesian(2004), where takes of the artist struggling to make use of a blond wig, blue contact lenses, and fractured English are interspersedwith clips from postwar television imports ranging from Bewitched to more recent indulgences such as Basic Instinct, hinting at anequally willful Japanese abandonment of adulthood, fact and identity.

Set against Paik’s Global Groove and Cinéma Metaphysique Nos. 2, 3 and 4 (1967-72), on display throughout the exhibition, theseemerging artists’ works collectively reaffirm his legacy while encouraging reflection on the genealogical complements and conflicts invideo art since its inception. The exhibition’s own division into three parts, with each meta-episode featuring 10 works over 10 days,also adds a layer of commentary on change and continuity over measured time. Standing amidst the flowers gracing the floor ofthe flickering exhibition hall in Paik’s memory, one suspects he would have heartily approved.

- Harry Perlmutter

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© Copyright 2006. Art Asia Pacific Publishing, LLC.

S IBLINGS

Writing Politics

on Your Flesh:

An Interview

with Mariam Ghani

ABOUT TO M

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WRITING POLITICS ON YOUR FLESH:AN INTERVIEW WITH MARIAM

GHANIT OM LE E S ER , B E TH ROS E NB E RG

BR: Ok. So, you call yourself a translator.

GHANI: Right.

BR: On your bio, you say you’re part Afghan, part Lebanese, and that you feel that you can

translate in between cultures. Can you talk about this whole idea of translation? Especially

because I think it’s interesting as here we are having a talk, which will then be translated,

and also will be edited and translated again and again.

GHANI: I’ve been interested in translation for a really long time, which probably comes from

my background in comparative literature. Translation for me has been a preoccupation

because I can’t actually literally translate most of the time between the different cultures

that I’m a party to, in that I wasn’t brought up speaking Dari, I wasn’t brought up speaking

Arabic. I had to learn these languages as an adult, and I’ve never learned them particularly

well. The types of translations that I’m preoccupied with are cultural translations and

generational translations. It’s translation more in the sense of a kind of transmutation. You

know, actually translating the substance of ideas across divides, across borders, rather than

literally translating the terms through which the ideas are spoken. Growing up, I was often in

the situation of being surrounded by languages I didn’t speak; I became fascinated with this

idea of translation.

BR: You grew up with those languages but did your mother and father speak them to each

other or to family members?

GHANI: In my house different languages had very specific roles. My mother and I would speak

French to each other, and that was the language of women. In the household, nobody else

would speak French. My mother and father would speak Dari to each other, and that was the

private language of parents. As a family, we’d all speak English to each other, because that

was actually my parents’ common language when they met. They had made this deliberate

decision not to teach us Dari and Arabic when we were children, because they wanted to let

us assimilate into American culture, in the belief that they would never be able to go back to

Lebanon -- which proved to be totally wrong later, but that’s what they thought when we were

kids. It was the eighties, and there were civil wars going on. There we were with all these

different languages going on that had these very specific roles in the house. Some of them I

was privileged to, and some of them I wasn’t.

TL: I'm curious about the idea of translation and what you refer to as the language of

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for Integra t ed

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isn't simply one of a system or method; I think there's something else that's got your

interest. The intention of translating a text from one language to another is to adapt but not

alter the original. Are you curious about the possible loss of meaning in the translation

process and how content is then possibly mutated?

GHANI: I’d like to speak about this in the context of the first project that I worked on about

translation. This is a project that has never been exhibited, because I’ve not actually finished

it. It is the first video I ever made when I was still an undergrad in comp lit at NYU. It was

the reason I started making video. It’s called Shahrazade Divided and it’s a project about the

stories of my mother’s family in Lebanon, and how they’re translated as they’re transmitted

from mother to daughter, over three generations. With this video, I became really interested

in how, because of the family Diaspora that happened with the civil war, the stories would, as

they were passed down, be translated not only literally, but also across the cultures that we

had been spread across in the family. Suddenly we were also translating across these cultural

divides that had sprung up between the different generations of the family. The generational

divides that were translated across were much, much wider than they had been in previous

generations of the family or eras of the family, because of the cultural divides via the Diaspora

and the war. There was a division created between the family that stayed and the family that

left. There’s this tremendous difference that springs up between people who live the war and

people who live the war long distance. What I started doing WAS looking at it through the

filter of conflict, reading a lot of Jakobson, Bakhtin, and Walter Benjamin’s The Task of the

Translator. There’s interlingual translation; there’s intersemiotic translation, which is

transmutation; and there’s this idea of the task of the translator. Interlingual translation is

literal translation from one language to another. Intersemiotic translation is the translation

from one actual set of meanings -- one way of making meaning -- to another way of making

meaning. The task of the translator in Benjamin is not to reproduce faithfully the original

intention of the author, but to produce a new meaning that’s in harmony with the original

intention of the author. That was really interesting to me, because what I saw in the family

stories (which had become at this point a kind of family mythology) was that each of us as a

storyteller—my grandmother, my mother and myself—had a completely different intent in

telling those stories. We were each trying to accomplish something different and we were

addressing ourselves to different audiences. This goes back to Bakhtin and his idea of

addressivity in speech. Basically, what was happening was that as each translation across a

generation happened, the stories gained completely new meanings that were meant to

preserve their importance in those new cultural conditions. Each storyteller attempted to

preserve the particular meaning they wanted to transmit to their audience in the family. The

transmutation that happened, that new set of signs that the story would take on was actually

this completely new set of meanings that would come out in each of those stories as they

were translated, because it was a sort of a self-preservation function. This is where I tied it

back to the idea of Shahrazade in THE 1001 Nights, KNOWN AS also known as the classic

Arabian Nights. In the story of Shahrazade, and the other core stories in the Damascus

version of 1001 Nights (which is the oldest version of 1001 Nights) all the stories are about

storytellers who have to tell their stories in order to save their own lives. The idea is that

storytelling at its most basic level is always about self-preservation.

BR: Why do you think you can never finish that piece? I mean, it sounds so powerful and

personal. Is it something that you’re continuing to work on?

GHANI: Yeah, I’m trying to raise some money to finish it right now. It was one of those

projects where the first video you ever make, you can’t make it the way you want to make it

because it’s your first video and you don’t quite know your medium yet. When I first made it,

I made it as a single-channel experimental documentary, because that’s the way that I was

working at the time. Now that I’ve been thinking about it for so much longer, I want to

remake it as a three-channel interactive installation, where each storyteller has her own

projection, and you’re actually experiencing the stories in counterpoint. The viewer gets to

determine which story functions as a translation of which other story. So the viewer becomes

the final translator of the stories. In the end, the installation would come out much more like

a real family storytelling session, where everyone’s voices are always on top of each other.

Sometimes it’s sweet harmony and sometimes it’s really brutal counterpoint.

TL: I like the idea that you raised earlier about self-preservation as being a function of

translation. But I’m also curious about this notion of translation versus interpretation. It

seems that the role of the interpreter may actually affect that notion of self-preservation.

When you get involved in “new media,” or whatever, you’re allowing the audience to in some

ways participate within the authorship of the piece. The interpretation, I think, in some

cases, might actually be a factor in how you as an artist want to position yourself as a

translator.

GHANI: It’s true that in my more recent work, I’ve been less inclined to take on the role of a

translator, and more inclined to take on the role of a moderator; somebody who sets up a

forum for discussion, and then facilitates it or intervenes in it at crucial moments and

organizes certain threads or creates a particular medium through which people can express

their questions and answers. But one way in which I’ve continued to experiment with the idea

of translation is with recent projects where I’ve been working with questions and answers,

where I’ve had viewers submit to me responses in text, which I then re-imagine as images.

BR: How does that work? I notice that you did that on your website. Your site says something

like: “Submit it to me as a question, and I’ll respond in two weeks.” I mean, did people really

write to you and ask you, for example: “Explain the atrocities of the warquote ?

GHANI: They really do. It’s a really strange phenomenon to me, in many ways. The Kabul:

Reconstructions project is the first project where I started working with the web, and the

first project where I started working with questions and answers. Actually, working with the

web came out of working with questions and answers, because the project originally started

as a video that I made on my first trip to Kabul. The video was installed in this refugee tent

that I put up in the gallery at Exit Art for their Reconstruction Biennial. There was a

three-channel video on monitors inside the tent; there was a carpet and cushions where

people could sit and watch the video, and there was a desk with a web log on an iMac that

people could browse. The web log was set up so that these students at the Aina Afghan Media

Center in Kabul could post updates to the video. I was there for two weeks and I thought, why

should I have the final word on the reconstruction of Kabul? I’d also invited some other

Afghan-Americans to post their thoughts about the idea of reconstruction. What happened

then was I decided to do a performance inside the tent, where I would come in once a week

and I would serve people tea and World Food Program biscuits inside the tents and I would

offer to answer their questions about Afghanistan. The show ended up being extended to three

months. So I was doing this every week for three months. It became the most interesting

part of the project for me, because I would get into these really intense exchanges with

people in the tent, where they would start out by asking me very simple questions like, “How

did you make this project?” or “How did you get to go to Kabul?” We would get into these long

exchanges of family Diaspora stories. Sometimes people would literally come into the tent

and ask me to explain the entire history of the Afghan civil war to them. They would sit there

for three hours and just listen. The whole thing was really kind of shocking to me, because at

the time, I was just starting to construct for myself an Afghan identity, which was never

something I had before September 11th. After September 11th, all of a sudden I was the only

Afghan that anybody around me knew, and I had to answer these questions all the time in my

private life.

BR: I’m so glad you brought up September 11th, because it’s actually one of the questions

that I had for you. Here you are a young artist who just graduated in 2002 from SVA with your

graduate degree. In the midst of that September 11th happens. Clearly, that must’ve affected

your work, who you are and the narratives that you create.

GHANI: Right before September 11th, I had gone on this three-month trip to make my MFA

thesis video, which is called Permanent Transit. It’s a video that ended up being screened in

the New York Video Festival. I’d been on this three-month trip, where I’d crossed as many

borders as possible. That was the point of the trip, that’s how I’d organized it. So I’d been to

Ramallah, I’d been all over the Middle East; I’d been all over Europe.

BR: Did you use your US passport? You were born and raised in the United States, right?

GHANI: Yes. Having just come back from the West Bank in the middle of the second Intifada

and then September 11th happened--it didn’t seem that shocking to me, because I had just

been in all these places where these sort of things happen all the time. Everything that

happened afterwards was what really affected me, because then the big break for me

happened on October 7th, 2001, which is when the US bombed Afghanistan. That was a real

sort of split personality moment for me, because I felt like I was both the bomber and the

target. Being an Afghan-American it’s very difficult to know how to feel about that. Everyone

else I knew who had that same sort of identity crisis was in the same position, because on

the one hand, we sort of wanted to find a silver lining in it; we wanted to feel like: ok, maybe

we’ll get rid of the Taliban. On the other hand, we knew that all kinds of devastation were

going to come out of this. It was a really difficult moment politically and it was a really

difficult moment personally. My parents moved back to Afghanistan.

BR: Right before, or right after?

GHANI: My dad went over with the United Nations right after. He was part of the Bonn

process. He ended up in the interim government after the first Loya Jirga, the emergency

Loya Jirga. So he was there as part of the reconstruction effort, which was something he’d

been basically working towards, dreaming about for twenty-five years, which was very

exciting for him.

BR: Is that how you got access to the tribal council--through your dad? Can someone just go

in and record it?

GHANI: No. At this point several things happened with my work. Before September 11th, I

had been making a series of video installations called Parallel Frames, which was about

evoking connections between cataclysmic political events in other places and times and

mundane occurrences at home. I’d been making all this political work and suddenly it was a

good moment for political work. So that’s the first thing that happened to my work after

September 11th18. The second thing that happened was that all this footage that I had shot in

the summer before the fall of 2001 took on a very different tint for me. It became very difficult

to work with, because it was all this footage about East and West, the border zones and the

no-man’s-lands between East and West. It was about crossing and not crossing and being in

suspension between those two places. It took me a long time to finish that project. I

eventually found a way through that. The third thing that happened was that eventually, I

managed to go to Afghanistan, and then I started working on the series of projects I’m now

calling the Kabul Quartet, because it’s going to have four parts. Two of them are done, one is

in progress, and then the fourth one I’m going to shoot next year. The fourth thing that I

started working on was the project about detention and deportation and the disappeared after

September 11th, and the consequences of the Patriot Act. This project is called How Do You

See the Disappeared?

TL: I think this is really interesting because as an artist you have a really unique perspective,

which are both being the privileged and the other. I think we’ve learned a lot from 2001. One

thing that I’ve come across a lot in discussing issues about this, and discussions about the

present day reality of what we’re doing in the Middle East and what we’re doing, actually, in

the world, we tend to speak very superficially, from a privileged point of view. We don’t really

get into the complexities of the situation. From the Western point of view, we don’t

necessarily want to get into discussing the complexities because then we realize our

complicity. I’m wondering if you could address that a little bit, the notion of amnesia, or the

notion of forgetting, in terms of being a privileged Westerner, in regards to the issues that are

currently at play in the world. Also can you discuss the paradoxes of the complicity?

GHANI: I think one of the things that I’ve always been really interested in within my work is

the idea of visibility and invisibility. I think this connects a lot to the idea of forgetting and

amnesia. When I first started making my project about Lebanon, one of the things that

intrigued me about Lebanon was its national amnesia about the civil war. There’s this sort of

willful amnesia about the civil war and the reality that everything in Lebanese society that led

to the civil war was still present in its society today. This is still true, even with all the kind of

tumultuous revolution or whatever that’s going on there right now. I think since September

11th, we’ve seen here in the United States a kind of willingness to slip back into an easy

definition of what it means to be American, you know? A sort of a willingness to forget

everything that’s happened, maybe, between World War II and today in terms of our history

and our dealings with the world. As a power in the world, we’ve never dealt with anyone in a

way that is unlike what we did in World War II. We have forgotten the entire history of

underhanded or duplicitous or secret intelligence dealings that we’ve had in the world that

might in some way lead to consequences for us. There’s a way in which people don’t want to

think through the complexity of what it means to be a power in the world in the way that this

country is today. There’s a way in which people don’t want to think through what it means to

have the kind of privilege that they have. The idea that with privilege comes responsibility

isn’t a very popular idea today. This is really strange to me, because that’s the idea that I

was always raised with as the child of people who were born with a certain kind of privilege in

their own societies, but who came to the U.S. as immigrants who didn’t have anything when

they came here. My parents raised us with this idea that as soon as we had anything, we

were supposed to give it away. If you were working, you were supposed to work for a

nonprofit organization. If you were making anything in the world, if you were creating

anything, you were supposed to create it for the greater good. It always surprises me when

other people don’t share this mentality.

BR: How did the last U.S. election affect you?

GHANI: I just wasn’t surprised at all. I felt like I did as much as I possibly could to swing it

the other way and it didn’t. At the time, I was so involved in my immigrant rights

activism—that’s where most of my activist energy is going right now. Most politicians do not

see immigrant rights activism as a voting bloc, so it’s very hard to play electoral politics with

this issue.

BR: There’s a question that you raised to the girls that you taught at the Eyebeam middle

school program called Girls-Eye View. I think you said something to the effect of, “Why

address the political through the personal or the public through the private?” Can you answer

your own question, because through your art you are always talking about the private and the

political.

GHANI: One of the things that really struck me about the exchanges that I had in the tent

when I was doing Kabul: Reconstructions was this feeling that I was able, on this very, very

small scale, to connect with people and provoke them in some way to rethink their ideas

about how the United States was connected to Afghanistan, or how the United States was

connected to all of the world in a way. I felt like the reason that worked, and then the reason

why that worked later also on the web, was the idea of the very small scale of the interaction,

the kind of human scale of interaction. When I started thinking about the disappeared and the

detention and deportation project, the thing that really struck me about the 760 men who

were the special interest detainees, was that the reason why they so effectively disappeared

was that they were stripped of all their human characteristics; they were stripped of all their

individuality. They were stripped of their means, they were stripped of their family

connections and they were stripped of all the details that would have identified them as

individuals. This happens on a much larger scale to pretty much everybody who enters the

immigration system. Individuals become nothing but detainees; they become abstractions.

To me, the reason why political debates are so charged and so volatile some of the time, and

so ineffective for us on the pacifist side or on the side of trying to get people to see the human

cost of issues--the reason why it’s so hard to do that most of the time is because political

debates are conducted in abstractions. We’re usually speaking about issues in the most

general and the most abstract of terms. For me, when you want to add the idea of human

cost, or when you want to get somebody to look at an issue through a different sort of prism,

it’s really, really effective to scale the issue back down to the personal, to the human. You

use the specific, the individual and the personal. When you address these issues through the

personal, it’s just so much easier to talk about them in a way that, instead of appealing to

reason, it reaches something more visceral. I think the reason this is my method of working

is because for me, the political has always been the personal. That’s just the way I’ve always

lived it, because I’ve grown up with two civil wars constantly in the background of my

domestic life. Politics to me has always been something that could just explode in your living

room and be written out on your own flesh. It’s never been abstract to me.

TL: That’s an interesting point and maybe we could think about this in relationship to media.

In some ways, what occurs with the abstraction for me is that it happens on a platform that

isn’t necessarily real. It’s occurring in the form of a value of red, green, blue and luminance.

It’s just showing up as something that I experience on a screen, and that has a forced

distance to it. I think if you bring it back to the September 11th issue, it’s amazing to me how

many people said to me, “It looked like a movie.” In other words, not only was it such an

abstraction in the sense of the occurrence of it—no one ever would’ve even dreamed that this

could’ve happened, not only here, but the way it happened—it felt like a film. It felt like

something not real. What I like about what you were talking about, in terms of using the

personal as the vehicle, it seems to only use the media as a necessary transmission device.

There’s no self-reflectivity in your work that allows an abstraction— the comfort of the

abstraction and the safety of the distance. You preclude that. So we’re left with that visceral

feeling, we’re left with that raw kind of experience of someone telling us a story.

BR: When I viewed, Kabul: Reconstructions, it felt to me like I was walking into the middle of

a government proceeding. It was very arresting. I thought, “Wait, maybe these are actors.”

In a way, having grown up with the presence of the image, which is so strong, you must ask

yourself where is the fact, where is the fiction? How do people react to your works? Do they

say: That really happens? Or, are you teaching them a little bit of history, or are you shocking

them? What do you know to be the viewer reaction?

GHANI: With the installation of Kabul: Constitutions or Part Two of KABUL:

RECONSTRUCTIONS, I did guided tours of the installation on Saturdays. I would come in and

give tours for four hours of the map on the carpet that was a replica of the map of the entire

space of the assembly, that is the plenary tent, surrounded by the auxiliary tents and the

security structures, where the entire constitutional assembly took place. I would help people

match up the projections on the three walls to the spaces in the map where they were taking

place. I would show them the different parts of the map that were interactive, where they

could trigger the projections of those particular parts of the space. I would give them this

enormous amount of information about what they were seeing: who was talking to whom;

what it meant that this person was talking to that person; what each tent had been used for;

what the different parts of the process had been; who had been sitting in the different assigned

seating areas of the plenary tent; and how I had organized that into the different parts of the

projection. I think the people who took the guided tour with me were engaged with the

process that happened at that constitutional assembly, and they really had this experience of

getting a backstage pass to the constitutional assembly. It was the idea of exposing the guts

of the political process, showing all the parts of it that you don’t normally see and that the

media doesn’t think are interesting. It was about all the things that happen outside of where

the camera’s eye normally travels. Things like an auxiliary tent or a security structure would

never normally be filmed (even by somebody doing a documentary). There were actually

many traditional documentaries made about the Loya Jirga. So part of what I was doing with

that installation was this experiment with the idea: can you make an entire project out of

what would be a B-roll in any other documentary? Would people be interested in that? People

really, really were, because these are all the things that you normally only get glimpses of. At

the same time, there was an enormous amount of information about what had happened in

the assembly in the plenary tent projection, which showed the different speeches that had

gone on and that touched on a lot of the issues that were brought up. If you were to sit there

and watch it for two-and-a-half hours, you would know pretty much everything that happened

at the Jirga. Of course, few people would sit there and watch it for two-and-a-half hours. But

if you came in and sat there for twenty minutes, you would see the entire loop of the outer

channels, and you would see pretty much all the space.

TL: What’s interesting about is that you’re working in opposition to a centralized view. You

seem to be using media to construct a decentralized view of this particular issue. What

allows you to do that? Is it the approach to the content or the medium being used?

GHANI: I think from the very beginning of working with video, I was a little bit turned off by

the idea of the single-channel and I was always trying to push its limits of linearity. I was

making single-channel videos that when you watched them, they seemed like they could’ve

been edited sixteen other ways and still make sense. So, I just was always really, really

attracted to the idea of database form. I think this goes back to my preoccupation with

memory and history, and the idea that our constructions of history are extremely flexible, and

are always constructions from a large number of possible datasets of history. The way that

we tell history is another way of storytelling. The memory bank of history is a large data set

from which we draw different narratives. I’m interested in telling these political histories in

ways that aren’t linear, because I think this challenges the notion of history as a linear

narrative told by one victor.

TL: Doesn’t it also allow us to draw different conclusions at the same time?

GHANI: Exactly.

TL: That seems to be a very interesting point for me. In traditional broadcast or traditional

linear style of work, you’re not necessarily drawing this— you’re interpreting, again, the

conclusions of an author.

GHANI: Right.

TL: With data set, you’re actually allowing those conclusions to be drawn by the viewer.

GHANI: Yes. I really enjoy having viewers find their own paths through the material, because

I like being surprised by what people find in there.

BR: You ask so many questions. In the Warm Database I love the questions that you were

asking, such as, “If you could remember an offhand remark that someone once made to you

that stayed with you and you haven’t forgotten.” The other question was something like,

“What’s the birthday present that you always wanted but never received?” These are haunting

and intense questions. Where do they come from?

GHANI: Well, the questions in the Warm Database came out of this research that I did into all

the questions that people were asked during special registration, and all the questions that

people were asked during their interrogations in special interest detention. I thought about all

of those questions for about a week, and then I tried to come up with questions that were the

exact opposite of those kinds of questions. I wanted to ask questions that were the kind of

questions the government would never ever ask you.

BR: Like the opposite of “What birthday present?”

GHANI: The opposite of that question would be something like, “What miscellaneous numbers

can you give me to prove that you are who you say you are?”

BR: Oh, ok.

GHANI: That’s a literal question you get asked during special registration. I also wanted to

ask questions that would elicit answers that would not identify you to anyone except your

closest friends and family; questions that couldn’t be held against you in a court of law;

questions that wouldn’t prove or disprove anything.

BR: So basically, the most inane, mundane questions, that don’t even matter? So your

answers to those questions in the Warm Database, it’s just like a trick.

GHANI: No, it’s not a trick, exactly. The idea of those questions is to find a way to generate

an individual data set for a person that was still anonymous. With that whole questionnaire,

I’m trying to create a system for collecting the individual stories of people who have been

detained and deported. The thing is that you have to find a way to do it that preserves their

anonymity. The reason there’s such a problem with collecting these stories and putting a face

on this issue is because so many people are afraid to come forward, because they fear

reprisals, they fear losing their status, if they’ve been able to get status. There’s a lot of

stigma in the community around having been in proceedings or having been detained. If

they’ve been deported back to their home countries—a lot of the home countries blame all the

ills of society on deportees. So, you don’t want your name attached to this kind of thing. The

whole idea of it was to find a way—and it was a really delicate process—to create a portrait of

someone without creating a portrait of someone. And to ask questions that wouldn’t offend

anyone, and wouldn’t probe too deeply, but would still tell you something about someone. It

would be really different from person to person. Nobody ever answers those questions the

same. Everyone’s answers are totally different. It’s always really fun for me to read the

answers.

BR: What do you do with the answers?

GHANI: I am returning to that project; I left it aside for three months while I was an

artist-in-resident at Eyebeam. I’m going to collect, hopefully, twenty or thirty more

responses from detainees and deportees, and we’re going to add them to the Warm Database

section of the site, and then we’ll re-launch it. I’ve gotten a lot of answers to the solidarity

questionnaire already and some of them I’ve been using for this project Points of Proof that

I’m doing for the Arab American National Museum.

BR: The museum in Detroit. Do you want to talk about that project?

GHANI: Sure. It’s sort of a sidebar to the detention and deportation project. This goes back to

what I was saying earlier about American identity and how I feel like a lot of people have

become very unthinking about the idea of American identity and what it means lately. So

what I’m doing with Points of Proof is I’ve been interviewing a whole series of people. I’ve

interviewed people in Detroit, in Dearborn and in other parts of the city. I’m asking this

question: If someone questioned your right to call yourself an American, what would be the

object or image or story or document that you would offer as your proof of your American

identity? I’m also asking them if there are any ways in which they consider themselves more

than just American.

BR: Do you film them as well?

GHANI: I film them answering the question. Some of them bring me things to photograph and

I’ve been collecting those things. The project is a video. There’s also a wall of hooks with

postcards hanging from them behind it, which people can take off the wall and write their

answers to the question on and hang it back onto the wall. It’s a sort of primitive

interactivity.

BR: So it strikes me that as an artist you’re also like a performance artist and an

educator/teacher in all of your works.

GHANI: I think for the past couple of years, I’ve been really working at the intersection of art

and public dialogue. I’m going more and more in this direction as I get further along and

deeper into these two big projects, the Disappeared project and the Kabul project. I get more

and more interested in the public dialogue aspects of them, and the potential of art to

generate or to instigate public dialogue, and in how my work could possibly provoke dialogue.

TL: I like what Beth just said, because it feels to me like you’re almost taking on an

anti-media perspective in your work. And, having never met you and when I looked at the

piece—and especially the Kabul piece on the web—, there is something that’s very personal. I

think that you’re foregrounding your role as the artist, or in this case, a performer, or in this

case an educator while the media tends to feel like it supports you. It’s your background. I’m

curious to see how you think about your choices of media when you go about a project, and

how at the beginning, what do you choose, in terms of the relative media that you use.

GHANI: I started using video because I had a specific story I wanted to tell and I thought

video would be the best way to tell it. I think that’s always informed the way that I make

work, because I am making work with an idea that I want to communicate. It’s never about

the medium so much as it is about the message. I really believe in the importance of form as

informing the content, but supporting it. I mean the form has to be adapted to the content

always. I started working with video initially, because of the influence of Mona Hatoum and

Walid Raad. Also, I absolutely love the process of editing. It’s like a grammar to me that I

cannot get enough of, and that I just enjoy. Editing is almost like a native language to me,

when I speak it. So, most of my projects start with video, because the first way that I tend

to explore things is with the camera. In the past three years, most of the projects seem to

end up online, because I’ve tended to find that the web is the best medium for this idea of

dialogue. It’s the most efficient medium for this idea of public dialogue. When I do a

performance in a gallery, it has this amazing one-on-one quality to it. When you do an

exchange with people online, it still has that same personal element, like I’m performing a

service for someone or I’m getting a direct response from them to a question that I ask, but

then the exchange is documented online for other people to read. I first started working with

installation because most of my work responds to a place or a journey. So when I was

showing work, I wanted to negotiate a space for viewing that was in between the place where

I made the work and the place where I was showing the work. So that’s how I came to

installation, and that’s why when I show work, I almost always have an installation. I don’t

believe in a video on a monitor in a gallery, because it doesn’t reproduce for the viewer any of

my experience of making the work, which I think is important.

BR: Do you think you’ll always be interested in this idea of history in the making? Where do

you think you’ll go over the course of the next five years? Or, where would you like to see

yourself go?

GHANI: Well, I still have two more phases of the Kabul project to finish—one that’s about the

presidential elections, which is going to investigate this idea of the politics of choice in that

election, both in the decision making of voters and in the decisions that informed how the

electoral process itself was designed. I want to do a really big project around the

parliamentary elections, which I think will be the end of the Kabul project, because then

things might get a little dicey politically over there. I don’t know if I’ll be able to go there

anymore. What I would like to do around the parliamentary elections is actually go teach a

workshop at Kabul University and involve a group of students in the project. I could do a

series of oral histories around election districting for the parliamentary elections, and see

what old fault lines of ethnic and social-historical division of the city are stirred up within the

process of election districting and campaigning during the parliamentary elections. I would

like to do a voting booth installation with a poll worker performance for the Choice Project,

and the other would be a large district map with a series of projections that transform

archival footage into contemporary footage and vice versa when you approach them. I’m sure

this will take me at least three years to finish and to raise money for and everything. Then, I

really want to finish the Lebanon project.

BR: You really have a message. Do you ever think of entering academia because it seems like

you’d just be perfect to work with students?

GHANI: Yes, actually, I think about that all the time. Teaching is the only thing that really

makes sense to me. I would really like to teach at some point at a university. I’ve been doing

teaching-artist things, like at Eyebeam, which is great. But, of course, it’s harder to support

yourself doing that than teaching at a university. I’ve also been doing some more critical

writing as well, which has been good. I’m returning to my roots in writing.

BR: Are you writing to accompany your pieces?

GHANI: Yes, I’m writing along with the work. Chitra Ganesh and I—Chitra’s collaborating

with me on the Disappeared project—we just did a text for the Sarai Reader about that

project.

BR: Are you active in Sarai? What do you think of the community Sarai?

GHANI: It’s a really interesting community. I think they’ve been really good for the region, in

terms of activating it for a critical stance for media. Also, the listserv is really great.

BR: Yeah. Do you look at other listservs as well?

GHANI: I’m on a thousand listservs. I’m a terrible workaholic. I’m on nettime and Rhizome,

and I’m on iDC (Institute for Distributed Creativity) and pimatalk (performance and

interactive media), out of Brooklyn College. I’m on immigrant rights listservs in New York

that are run by the American Friends Service Committee; that takes up a lot of my reading

time. That’s why I started the Points of Proof project, because I was getting six articles a day

about drivers licenses and ID cards, which is a huge debate going on in the immigrant rights

community now because of The Real ID Act, which just passed Congress. This is the whole

idea of Points of Proof -- people are actually being asked to prove that they have the right to be

American and conduct American lives, even if they’ve been here for thirty years.

BR: You spend a lot of your time reading on the web.

GHANI: I do spend a lot of my time reading. I’m on an Afghan news listserv as well, which I

don’t read very much.

BR: It seems like a lot of your ideas formulate around issues that you read about.

GHANI: Yes. Much of my work is informed by the theoretical background that I have in

comparative literature. Edward Said is a really big influence on my work. Grahame Weinbren

was one of my teachers at The School of Visual Arts and he’s really great in terms of the

interactive. Judith Barry was another influence.

BR: When you talked about one of your pieces, I just kept thinking of

Grahame Weinbren’s work on psychoanalysis that he showed at The Kitchen a few years

back.

GHANI: He’s someone who definitely pushed me a lot to think about interactivity, and to

really think about the sense behind interactive events, or to think about the reasons for

interactivity and not to use it casually.

TL: Grahame comes from a background of critique. It seems that art historical critique

doesn’t necessarily apply to new media very often.

There’s a certain rigor there to his approach to practice and cultural practice in general, that I

find lacking in things that I read and the kind of issues that I hear talked about in the domain of

what everybody somehow mistakenly calls new media. It’s interesting that we bring up

Graham, because he comes out of an experimental film background. He and I worked together

in Los Angeles years ago, with the L.A. Independent Film Oasis. I feel l that there is a

historical linkage between the critical approaches of what had gone on prior to what’s

happening now and this notion of media actually being new is a bit of a fallacy, it’s a bit of a

fabrication.

GHANI: Yes.

TL: When you were talking about translation earlier, you were talking about the notion of

cultural and generational difference. Can you talk about that in relationship to this?

GHANI: I think the issue of cultural and generational translation has come up a lot because

I’ve been part of a lot of different immigrant communities, and there are very pronounced

generational differences in most immigrant communities here in the US because of

assimilation. Assimilation usually happens over generations. It distances generations from

each other culturally. So, there are ways in which different generations take on different roles

within the community. My generation—the hybrid generation or the first ones born in the new

country—we’re usually the translators for everybody else. We’re usually the ones who are

running back and forth between the different parts of the community translating everybody to

each other, even if we can’t literally speak the language. A lot of the time we can’t because

that was part of our assimilation.

BR: You understand it, but you may not be able to speak it.

GHANI: Right. A lot of the time, we have passive knowledge, not active knowledge—which is

another interesting thing to think about. When I was designing the class for Eyebeam’s

Girls-Eye View I was thinking about those girls who are eleven. They’re the generation that

was actually born in a world where the World Wide Web always existed. They’ve never lived

without the World Wide Web. Whereas, for example, when I was in college, I never even used

my email until I moved to Italy, and I had to. There was no Google when I was in college. The

medium is new, but I think it doesn’t have essential properties that are new. All the things

that I do with it, I think are pretty much the same as things that I did with other

technologies, except intensified in certain ways. I think the only thing that really draws me to

the Internet as a medium is its communication potential. I like its randomness. I like the

way people stumble across content. I also like the way it facilitates an intimate

communication between strangers. Those are the two things about the Internet that I think

are really nice. To me, it’s what’s maybe new about the Internet. But, with other

technologies, like the things that I use to make interactive installations, those aren’t

particularly new. I mean, I’m writing Basic when I program an interactive installation. That’s

not new.

TL: Right.

GHANI: The skill that I use the most when I make an interactive installation is soldering. I’m

not particularly good at being an electrician, and that’s something that I wish I were. That’s

not a very big skill for my generation, actually. I think maybe the generation of artists who

first made interactive installations were better in some ways with the actual circuits and the

physicality of making interactive installations. My generation is so divorced from the

physicality of technology. It’s a little more difficult for us. Or, at least it is for me.

BR: What about being a woman in this new media community?

TL: Because there aren’t many.

BR: I’m struck by your meteorite rise in the art world. I applaud you for it. I’m just wondering

how comfortable you are with it. You speak to so many different issues from women in media

to feminism to political activism and issues of identity and gender.

GHANI: Ok, I’m thinking about women and new media now.

BR: Maybe you don’t consider yourself a “woman in new media.” Perhaps you just consider

yourself an artist working in media technology.

GHANI: It’s an interesting question, because I definitely feel like my work is always gendered

in a certain way; although I don’t make my work from a specifically feminist

perspective—even though I am a feminist. My work hasn’t been specifically addressing issues

of gender identity. So I don’t think I’ve necessarily positioned myself in new media as a

woman in new media. I think I’ve probably positioned myself in new media more as a political

artist and possibly as a Third World artist in new media—even though I live in New York and

work from a position of privilege. But, in a way I’ve also positioned myself as an artist who’s

concerned with voicing or providing access in new media to people who don’t normally have

access to it, or who are voiceless in new media. That’s something I’ve been really interested

in, because the space of new media, which is supposed to be neutral, which is supposed to be

borderless isn’t at all.

BR: It’s supposedly neutral but itte s really not.

GHANI: I feel like a lot of our discourse about new media, like the critical discourse about new

media, is somewhat utopian.

BR: About two years ago, I went on nettime to ask a question to the group, at the invitation

of a nettime member. I really got a lot of flack for asking this seemingly factual question.

GHANI: You got flamed?

BR: Yes, I was flamed. The funny thing was that two things happened related to that. One

was that some women wrote me off list, “I’m sorry I couldn’t respond to your query, but you

know nettime,” that type of thing. The other thing that happened was Rachel Greene wrote

about that incident in her catalogue essay for the 2004 Whitney Biennial. I really feel that the

space and voice for women in new media, especially on all of these lists, is nil to none.

GHANI: On the lists, there are very few women who write. I don’t usually write on the lists.

One of the only lists that I write on is the diversity practices committee list for CAA, which is

basically Coco Fusco and me and a couple of other people like really going at each other. I

don’t write much on the lists and very few women do, it’s true. There’s a hostile environment

on a lot of the new media lists. Do you feel like it’s specifically hostile to women?

BR: Yes.

GHANI: It’s a very masculine voice.

BR: It’s a very masculine voice, and I think that most of the innovative tools—Basic, et

cetera—have been created by men. All women in new media always hark back to Ada

Lovelace and her loom technology. But, there’s got to be other disciples in terms of new

media other than Ada.

TL: But on the other hand, I think that some of the most interesting writing and insights come

from a female perspective. Years ago, when I first started critically thinking about this, the

one person who I reached for was Brenda Laurel. After that it was Rosanne Stone. I mean, no

one addressed those issues that Rosanne Stone was raising back then, and they were very

important issues, and they’re current issues right now. Maybe a way to think about this is

that it’s always had a domain of an exclusive club. But on another hand, I think about it and it

doesn’t really strike me as very much different from anything else in our culture. I think the

culture, specifically in the West, regardless of its intentions to be egalitarian, is anything but.

GHANI: Right.

TL: In many ways, race and gender are still at risk, in terms of people who are trying to write

from those particular perspectives. The risk to the other is potent, as you mentioned earlier

about being an immigrant—especially now in this heightened sense of awareness of the notion

of, quote/unquote, “terror” being the topic of the day. To be the other is a very risky thing.

GHANI: I think it also has a lot to do with who is in a position of privilege to write; who has

the time and who has the space. And, who has an academic or institutional position.

BR: Yes.

GHANI: Who is the person who can be on a list all day long and write six, seven times a day?

Who can be the dominant voice on a list? People like me, who make political work, who are

working from a different space, are in precarious positions in academia or in the art world. We

don’t have the income, we don’t have the time, and we don’t have the space to do these

things. You don’t write from the same position.

TL: That’s right.

BR: Unfortunately. What do you hope that ultimately your work can do as you send it out into

the world?

GHANI: Each project has a slightly different take; but ultimately, I’m always hoping, first, to

provoke people to question; to question the structures and the surfaces of the society they

live in, and to question the things that they take for granted about what surrounds them. And,

just to start conversations is also what I’m always hoping for. The second larger goal is that

I’m hoping that every work is generating these systems that people can use to tell their

stories, or to talk about their issues in new ways and to generate new terms for debate. We

keep having the same conversations and the same debates. I feel like maybe we need a visual

language instead of a verbal one so that we can say something new. My idea is just to offer

some alternatives.

S IBLINGS

Listening and

Space

Grounding Play:

Imaginary

Children in an

Era of Global Paranoia

Going Virtual

Divining the

Question: An

Unscientific

Methodology for the Collection of

Warm Data

What Time Is It?

Media

Miniature

Digital

Composition

and the Notion of

Self-Worth

ABOUT

MARIAM

GHANI

ga lle ry

>>LINKS

Mariam Ghan i

i s a

B rooklyn-bas edar ti s t w hose

w ork in

video,

i nstall at ion,new med ia,

photography,

t ext and

publ i cdi alogue

performance

inves tigates

how his t oryi s

c ons t ruc t ed

and

reconst ructedas narrat ive

in the

present ,

VIRALNET2 / about : essays :

DIVINING THE QUESTION: ANUNSCIENTIFIC METHODOLOGY FOR THE COLLECTION OF WARM DATA

MAR I AM GH A N I

If tomorrow you found yourself with no passport and no birth certificate, and someone came

up to you and said, “You no longer have the right to be an American,” what story, object,

image or document would you offer as your proof?

With this question begins the story of Points of Proof, a video installation, postcard and public

dialogue project originally commissioned for the inauguration of the Arab American National

Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and currently being expanded online thanks to a Longwood

Digital Matrix commission. When the museum invited me to make a community-based

project in Dearborn in March of 2005, I was in the second year of an ongoing, open-ended,

collaborative project about the human cost of immigration policy, which has grown in the

form of several nested and linked collections of what I call “warm” data, known collectively as

the Disappeared project. Points of Proof emerged both in response to the specific conditions of

that place and moment, and as a special case among the warm databases of the Disappeared

project.

I first began thinking about the idea of warm data at the end of 2001, when I began following

the cases of the “special interest” detainees — 760 men who were picked up by the INS on

immigration violations just after 9/11/01, identified by the FBI as being of “special interest” in

relation to 9/11, and then disappeared into the secret files, courts, and cells erased from the

public eye by a Department of Justice blanket gag order, which prevented anyone connected

with their cases from even speaking their names for much of the next three years. When the

short-lived but merciless Special Registration program was introduced in the following year, I

watched as immigrant men from “terror watch list” countries came forward to wait in long,

cold lines for days, only to be asked long lists of dehumanizing questions, then often

remanded to custody overnight and asked them again, and again, before being detained or

deported away from their families. I read the 1996 immigration laws, the Patriot Act, reports

and legal briefs, and discovered the traps built by the language of the law: reactions that

become terms that become classifications that enclose and exclude. I found the post-9/11

documents full of absences -- redactions, erasures, censorships -- that were paralleled by the

part i cu l arly

i n the border

z ones and

poli t icals paces of

t rans it i on

w here pas t,

present andfuture emerge

as s t or i es

t old in

t rans la t i on ,c ontest and

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internat i onall y

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t he L iverpool

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Danis h F i lmInst i tu t e,

t rans mediale

i n Berl i n,

Smart P rojec tSpace in

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in R io de

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t he New York

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Turbulenc e.org ,

ar twurl , theLongw ood

absences visible in every immigrant community in the city, as midnight raids spread from

neighborhood to neighborhood. I visited detention centers and followed the news on

immigrant rights listservs. Each time I read a new story of disappearance I thought: This

could have been us — my brother, my father, my mother, me. If I had been born earlier, in

Afghanistan. If we had emigrated later, when political asylum became a decision hanging on

the word of one airport customs officer. And I wondered: would it be possible for someone

who never literally came so close to being in our precarious position to make the same

empathetic leap?

In the fall of 2003, I moved my studio into the Woolworth Building, thanks to a Lower

Manhattan Cultural Council residency to develop a project about the disappeared. From the

window of my studio, which itself had been gutted and left vacant after 9/11, I could see

Ground Zero and the de- and re-constructions that surrounded it. Most of Manhattan was

taken with the debate over what, exactly, could be built in the footprint of the towers. In my

studio, I had pinned up on the wall a copy of the list of special interest detainees, which was

for many months the only document of their existence. I was worrying over the question of

how to fill in those blank black spaces where first their names, and then their real lives and

family ties, had been erased. How could I “give a face” to this issue, as immigrant rights

advocates were telling me was necessary, when I wasn’t allowed to see or speak to the

people I wanted to portray? The impossible trick would have to be creating a portrait of

someone that would restore their humanity while maintaining their all-important anonymity

-- whether legally mandated, as in the case of the special interest detainees, or dictated by

fear of losing status or social stigma with former detainees and deportees.

The answer I arrived at was the idea of the warm data questionnaire: a series of questions

designed so that each set of responses creates a unique and highly individual dataset — a data

description of a person -- which at the same time lacks the identifying details that would

usually link it to a real person. A warm data body is a portrait, not a profile; when a warm

data body is erased, the real body remains intact. Warm data is easiest to define in

opposition to what it is not: warm data is the opposite of cold, hard facts. Warm data is

subjective; it cannot be proved or disproved, and it can never be held against you in a court of

law. Warm data is specific and personal, never abstract. Warm databases are public, not

secret. However, warm data can only be collected voluntarily, not by force; the respondent

always has a choice — whether to answer or not, which questions to answer, on what terms

she will answer, and if her answers will be anonymous. A warm database is distinguished

from a corporate or government database not primarily by its interface or its underlying

structure, but by the way its data is collected. There are two parts to the collection process:

designing, or really divining, the right questions to ask; and creating the correct conditions for

answering. The latter task usually entails creating a condition of trust between questioner and

respondent, so that the question becomes an invitation rather than an invasion. I’ve found

that the necessary trust can be created by working within a community, borrowing the bona

fides of an institution, or using the network as an anonymizer.

The process of designing a warm data question is somewhat more complex. For me, the

process begins with research (into a community, issue, or idea), then a variable period of

mulling, and then some writing where questions seem to emerge from thin air, but I suspect

are really generated by a combination of intuition and that empathetic imagination I

mentioned earlier. I also like to road-test questions on friends and/or community activists

before I make a project with them. For example, when I designed the warm data

questionnaire for How Do You See the Disappeared? A Warm Database, a web project

commissioned by Turbulence in 2004, I began by talking to a human rights lawyer who had

debriefed some of the special interest detainees just before they were deported. He described

Digi t al

Matr i x, and

t he A rab

Amer i canNationa l

Museum in

Dearborn fo r

i t s i nauguralexhibit i on.

Her c ri t i ca l

w r it i ng on

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t he pol i t ic s o f

new med ia,

andnetworked

arch i ves has

been feat ured

in the Sara iReader 05,

Samar , A r ts

and Lei s ure ,

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and Pro t est ,

and s he hasmoderated

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part i cipated

on rela t edpane l s for

NYU's

Kevorkian

Center, t heAANM, the

Amnes ty

Internat i onal

F i re flyProject , SUNY

S t ony Brook,

and LMCC .

She recei vedher B .A . wi t h

honors i n

Comparat i ve

L i te raturefrom NYU in

2000 and her

MFA i n

Photography,V ideo &

Rela t ed Med ia

from the

S c hool ofV i sual A r ts in

2002, where

s he w as

aw arded t heAaron S i s kind

for me some of the questions that they were asked repeatedly during their interrogations. I

found a group at the Riverside Church that went on weekly visits to asylum seekers being held

at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Queens, and I started riding along with them to find

out what kind of conversations people who were being isolated from their families and culture

might be interested in having. Then I did some further research online and with immigrant

rights activists in New York and developed a list of all the questions that were asked during

Special Registration, then read about some of the statistical outcomes for immigrants of the

different responses they gave. I took a few weeks to think about those questions, and then I

sat down one day, thought about the questions that I would want someone to ask me if I were

in detention for two years, thought about what questions the government would never ask

you, and wrote a list. Then I invited both people who had been affected by detention and

deportation, and people who wanted to fill out the questionnaire in solidarity, to answer the

questions.

A few of those first warm data questions:

Who was the first person you ever fell in love with?

What place do you see when you close your eyes at night?

Describe an offhand remark that someone once made to you that you’ve never been able to

forget:

What piece of music is always running through your head?

What is the one birthday present you always wanted and never received?

In 2005, I took another question from the Disappeared warm data questionnaire, and adapted

it to generate the project that became Points of Proof, repurposing it in response to that

specific moment and place. That spring the REAL ID Act was being debated in Congress, the

media, and the many other arenas of the immigrant rights struggle. As I drove between the

museum's construction site in Dearborn, the most concentrated Arab community in the

United States, and Detroit, still one of the most racially divided cities in the country, the

bitter debate over this and other increasingly draconian pieces of immigration legislation rang

in my ears. REAL ID, which strips illegal and temporarily legal immigrants of the right to a

U.S. driver’s license and sets new, near-impossible standards of proof and credibility for

asylum claims, was passed just before the exhibition opened in May. The question posed by

Points of Proof thus reflects the situation in which ever larger numbers of American

immigrants find themselves by asking viewers and interviewees to reduce their American

identities to a single point of proof — points being the system used by a number of state DMV

bureaus to rate different documents for their effectiveness as proof of identity.

The question at the heart of Points of Proof is successful because it demands specifics, but

ensures that they will be subjective and variable; it engages both memory and imagination; it

immediately provokes the questioned to either confrontation or consideration; and it sets no

standards for wrong or right answers, implicitly questioning the whole notion of proof. The

question can be asked and answered in a video, on a sound recording, in a captioned

photograph, on a postcard, in person, or through the network. To make the first version of

Points of Proof, I interviewed on video 30 new and longtime Americans in urban Detroit and

suburban Dearborn. The video interweaves the surprising and complicated conversations

started by this single question, throwing into relief the subjective nature of identity and the

difficulty of pinning the constantly shifting idea of America within strictly national borders. The

question of proof quickly raises other questions -- Is geography destiny? Does culture extend

beyond citizenship? Is proof finally a question of faith and belief or does it depend on the

Memor ia l

S c ho lars hip .

O ver the pas t

fi ve years,s he has been

a Soros New

Amer i cans

Fell ow, aNYFA Fe l l ow

in Comput er

A r ts , and an

ar ti s t i nresidenc e a t

LMCC in t he

Woolw or t h

Building,Eyebeam

A t el i er ,

andSmack

Mellon. Shei s currently a

fe ll ow of the

Akademie

S c hlossSoli t ude in

S t ut t gar t ,

and also

t eaches i nt he

Depar tment

of Ar t, Mus i c

& Tec hnologyat the

S t evens

Inst i tu t e o f

Technology i nNew Jers ey.

material evidence at hand? -- whose answers are equally contested and complex. The project

was then further extended by a series of postcards filled out by visitors to the museum during

the show's six-month run, which allowed the audience to add their answers to the warm

database generated by Points of Proof's question. Given free (anonymous and unmoderated)

rein, these postcard respondents range from bitter to idealistic to hilarious. The success of

Points of Proof is that few of the 100+ people who have answered to date have repeated each

others' answers, and almost all have engaged with the hypothetical scenario posed by its

question. So for a few moments, at least, you who have answered have imagined yourselves

in our place.

Mariam Ghani / March 2006 / Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany

154 / Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts

Chitra Ganesh + Mariam Ghani

Notes on the DisappearedTowards a Visual Language of Resistance

Trespasses / 155

156 / Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts

Trespasses / 157

158 / Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts

Trespasses / 159

160 / Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts

By proposing new terms through which stories can be told and issues framed, ourcollaborative visual project – drawing from an ongoing collaborative inquiry into the humancost of US immigration policy – aims to make critical interventions in how narratives of

disappearance are produced on all sides of the US immigration debate. We explore two keyfeatures of disappearance: the mass immigrant detentions and deportations sweeping the USsince 9/11/01, and the radical limitation of representation, by both law and mass media, of theimmigrants who are caught in the system.

Over the past few years, immigrants and their advocates have come to understand how gagorders, media stereotypes and convenient abstractions hang like a veil between people directlyimpacted by detention and deportation, and the majority whose silence consents to thedisappearances. The struggle to generate a collective history of individual disappearances hastherefore been at the core of activist initiatives addressing this crisis.

However, much of the advocacy work around detention and deportation is mobilised throughthe law or mass media itself. Thus, narratives of resistance assembled by that advocacy risk beingsubjected to the very codes and language they seek to contest. For example, the recurring useof directed testimony, statistics and expert witnesses in activist documentaries about detentionand deportation both recall courtroom dynamics, and reiterate the pundit-driven rhythms ofnetwork news. Our work departs from this understanding of the situation of post-9/11disappearance, where individuals are ‘disappeared’ for a second time in the scarce and troublingvisual representation offered as their history in mass-mediated and legal domains. Our artisticinquiry thus exists in continual tension between collaboration with the activist movement towardsa collective history, and an effort to reconceptualise the terms through which that history is nowaddressed.

We seek to mine the rich possibilities of the visual as a site where audiences come face toface with the specific details of lives that are impacted by post-9/11 disappearance, but must alsoengage with the core cultural and systemic breakdowns that lie beneath current events. Ourcommon belief is that this deeper awareness can be activated by a commitment to form ascontent, and a profound engagement with the medium and materials through which the ideas ofpolitical art are communicated. Through transmutations and deconstructions that re-orientviewers’ perspectives, we hope to produce unexpected visual experiences that trigger areconsideration of social codes and histories.

In this project, we collect from the everyday past lives of the disappeared the unquantifiabledata which otherwise goes unnoticed. We create a space for this information to be read andconsidered without being reduced; we do so by framing it within intersecting nonlinear narrativeswhere meaning is produced in both the convergence and disjuncture between text and image. Thisproject shares concerns that are at the heart of our practices: an interest in exploring howmemories and their repression shape moments of personal and social crisis, and the mapping ofcontrapuntal narratives that emerge in the border zones between cultures in conflict.

Through this active translation of ‘raw data’ and formal choices that disrupt conventionalmodes of seeing, the Disappeared project aims to elaborate a visual language that truly resiststhe descriptive and narrative conventions and one-to-one relationships accumulated in the legaland media treatment of detention and deportation cases. Our belief is that only through a visuallanguage of resistance can a more nuanced representation and sharper analysis be articulated.

Trespasses / 161