NEW YORK, NY.- Ryan Lee presents Going, Going, Gone by Brooklyn-based artist Mariam Ghani in RLWindow, a fugue on abandoned spaces and economic collapse in New York composed from photographs shot and media sound bites collected during the fall of 2009.
Ghani shifts through images in a fast-paced repetitive sequence of five frames, the first four of which last for a fraction of a second, while the fifth freezes just long enough for the viewer to read it. The four-and-a-half minute video contains three internal loops, with the pattern shifting so that the readable frame is different in each loop. The images range over the city to show foreclosed homes and for-sale signs, flyers posted by predatory lenders and enticing banners hanging in front of empty luxury condos, lots where the fences protect only rubble and weeds, abandoned schools and demolished housing projects, storefronts going out of business, and construction halted in mid-stream. Ghani targets the intangible yet visible economic “borders” running through our urban environment, examining the fault lines in everyday systems and structures.
Going, Going, Gone was commissioned by Visual Foreign Correspondents as part of a series on borders to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It has screened internationally at Museum of Modern Art, New York; De Melkweg, Amsterdam, NL; and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, among others. It has been presented as a public projection at the Collegium Hungaricum, Berlin; U-Bahn at Kochstrasse (former Checkpoint Charlie), Berlin; and the urban screen at CASZuidas. It was also featured on Die Zeit online for the week of the Mauerfall anniversary.
Mariam Ghani (b. 1978, New York, US) received her BA from New York University in 2000 and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2002. Her work has exhibited widely, including at the Rotterdam transmediale and CPH:DOX film festivals; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, DE and Kabul, AF; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, US; National Gallery, Washington, DC, US; Queens Museum of Art, New York, US; Sharjah Biennials 9 and 10, Sharjah, UAE; Tate Modern, London, UK; 2004 Liverpool Biennial, UK; and Bronx Museum, New York, NY. Her work is the subject of upcoming exhibitions at CCCB, Barcelona, ES; Anchorage Museum, US; St. Louis Art Museum, US; and RYAN LEE, New York, US (Spring 2015).
RLWindow is a dedicated exhibition space featuring video, installation, and performance art designed to engage High Line visitors, viewable from the elevated park at 26th Street. Capitalizing on the gallery’s position overlooking the High Line and its visibility to almost 5 million yearly visitors, RLWindow will show innovative, experimental, and collaborative projects by international, contemporary artists, including RYAN LEE gallery artists and outside collaborations.
Forthcoming projects include work by Maria Antelman, Jakob Boeskov, Kevin Cooley, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Kakyoung Lee, Shin il Kim, Gabriel Lester, Joan Logue, Peter Sis, Sandy Skoglund, and Stephanie Syjuco.
