The countries of Norway and Afghanistan do not typically invite comparison, or even adjacent presentation, but the artist Mariam Ghani does just that in “Like Water from a Stone,” her new solo exhibition at Chelsea’s Ryan Lee Gallery. The show has two components: the first, its titular work, is the result of a joint effort with dancer-choreographer and longtime collaborator Erin Ellen Kelly; the second is “Afghanistan: A Lexicon,” a series of prints updating a project the artist first published as a book in 2011 and later presented at Documenta 13 in 2012.Encompassing photographic prints and a video, “Like Water from a Stone” is a site-specific work Ghani developed with Kelly during a six-week stint in Norway in 2013. Tracing the country’s varied geography from fjord to valley, the 20-minute film is the exhibition’s centerpiece, a loosely narrative series of landscape-based performances in which dancers interact intimately with the terrain. The dramatic natural backdrop — as Ghani tells it, a “beautiful landscape, but a very difficult one” — allows for a powerful juxtaposition between human form and geography. The video, which opens with a sequence featuring a dancer crawling, slowly, out of a dark tidal pool, concludes against an industrial backdrop in the city of Stavanger, capital of the country’s oil sector. The bodies that populate Ghani’s film appear alone or in groups of two or three (and once by double exposure). The dancers, who improvised their movements in response to the site, lie down, walk, float, and articulate their limbs — at times they are barely perceptible, receding discretely into the landscape. A haunting audio track by Qasim Naqvi complements the footage with a stereo composition that blends choral components with ambient noise recorded during filming in Norway.Though decidedly non-linear, the video’s palette of scenes and sites touches on key moments in Norway’s history, be it the discovery of oil in the frigid North Sea, which dramatically altered the course of the country’s history, seaside Nazi bunkers, or a lighthouse abandoned during a 20th-century financial crash in herring, one of the nation’s primary economic engines prior to the discovery of oil. From the 14th to 19th centuries, Norway was a part of the Danish empire, and Ghani recently told me that her interest in the country is linked to the energetic emergence of an independent national culture there in the 19th century. Her cinematography explicitly references the landscapes of 19th-century Norwegian romantic nationalist painting, a movement that was a part of a broader revival of national fervor during this early period of independence.These conceptual cues, so subtle as to be largely unknowable to the casual viewer, are what link “Like Water from a Stone” to the 12 prints displayed from “Afghanistan: A Lexicon.” Illustrated by archival images and photographs taken by Ghani in her native Aghanistan, the prints are single-page text entries offering accounts and definitions of key concepts in Afghanistan’s history of culture. The original project, as published and displayed in 2011 and 2012, was a collaboration between Ghani and her father, a former academic who was elected president of Afghanistan last year, but the entries on view are entirely her own effort. Yet her family remains close at hand: one page, on the “whispers” strategy of discrediting a “political and military” target by disseminating malicious hearsay, cites the smear campaign carried out by political opponents against Queen Soraya in the late 1920s that questioned her commitment to Islam. Today, Ghani’s mother, a Lebanese-born Christian, is subject to similar tactics by Islamist elements in the country.Though “Aghanistan: A Lexicon” occupies relatively scant real estate in the gallery — the works are hung opposite the wall onto which the Norwegian video is projected (the photographic prints from the latter occupy the front room) — it is fully one half of the conversation in the show, offering clues to the complex narratives that underlie even the most outwardly serene of landscapes.
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