Mariam Ghani’s apartment is a map to her layered identity.
Books rise from floor to ceiling, black binders of redacted Guantánamo Bay interrogations sharing shelf space with critical theory and dozens of cookbooks. An embroidered pillow made by a collective in Aleppo, Syria, before the bullets flew, sits on a vivid blue couch that matches the rug her father bought for her in Turkmenistan.
In the kitchen of her Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, loft, she curates her collection of refrigerator magnets with such maxims as: “This is your world. Shape it or someone else will,” but is embarrassed by the Mason jars of green tomatoes she pickled herself. “I’m a Brooklyn cliché,” Ms. Ghani said with a pained laugh.
Hardly. In her life and her career, Ms. Ghani, 36, lives between the labels. A New York-born visual artist, she is also the daughter of Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan.
“There’s plenty of people in the art world who don’t know, which is preferable,” said Ms. Ghani, whose work has appeared in the Museum of Modern Art and in the Tate Modern in London.
“She wants to be defined on her own merits,” said Erin Ellen Kelly, a choreographer and Ms. Ghani’s longtime film collaborator. “She wants people to look at her work and not her relationship to her family.”
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“I don’t think that works of art produce concrete change,” Ms. Ghani said. “If anything, they are thin ends of a wedge where they just create a small opening in someone’s mind where something more direct and more concrete can enter in.”
If she sounds like a philosopher-poet, well, she is. But Ms. Ghani is also a feminist, an archivist and an activist, as well-versed in the politics of extraordinary rendition as she is in the very Brooklyn pursuit of homemade chile-passion-fruit sorbet.
“One of the reasons I wanted to be an artist,” she said, “is because I saw that by being an artist I could be so many other things as well.”
And if she were not an artist? “I would be something totally different,” Ms. Ghani said. “Like maybe a cryptologist.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 22, 2015, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Art, Politics and a Famous Father. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
