Following our Sofa Cinema streaming weekend, curator Rasha Salti will be in conversation with Mariam Ghani about her project What We Left Unfinished and her ongoing project Dis-ease.

Ghani’s first feature-length film, the award-winning and critically acclaimed documentary What We Left Unfinished, is about five unfinished films from the Communist period in Afghanistan. It premiered at the 2019 Berlinale. Ghani is currently in post on her second feature, Dis-Ease, an essay film about the unexpected consequences of a century-plus of waging metaphorical war on disease.

Dis-ease was developed during Ghani’s residency at the Wellcome Collection and part of New York’s ‘Contagious Cities’ initiative, which ran in 2018-2019 and supported local conversations around the global challenges of epidemic preparedness.

Mariam Ghani is a New York based artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work looks at places, spaces and moments where social, political and cultural structures take on visible forms, and spans video, sound, installation, photography, performance, text and data. She has received numerous fellowships and exhibited at the Guggenheim, MoMA, the Sharjah and Liverpool Biennials, the Dhaka Art Summit, and Documenta 13 in Kabul and Kassel, among others. She is on the Film/Video faculty at Bennington College.

Rasha Salti is a curator of art and film working and living between Beirut and Berlin.

Image 1: Still from DisEase. Courtesy of Mariam Ghani.

Image 2: Still from DisEase. Courtesy of Mariam Ghani.

Image 3: Mariam Ghani at San Francisco International Film Festival 2019. Photo by Tommy Lau. Courtesy of Mariam Ghani.

Image 4: Rasha Salti. Courtesy of Rasha Salti.