While women in Afghanistan are consumed with dread about the return of the Taliban’s oppressive rule, the daughter of the country’s exiled President Ashraf Ghani lives the artist life in ny City.
Mariam Ghani, a 42-year-old visual artist and filmmaker, enjoys a bohemian lifestyle in her Brooklyn loft, where the contrast to harsh Taliban rule over women and girls couldn’t be more stark.
The Post trapped to her Tuesday, days after her dad abandoned the country to the Taliban and his citizens to the extremist militant group’s control.
She refused to answer questions from a reporter outside her apartment, located during a luxury co-op building on a quiet, leafy block of Clinton Hill, near buzzy restaurants and therefore the Pratt Institute.
Her embattled Afghan-leader dad snuck out of the presidential palace Sunday together with his clique of confidantes, and, consistent with the Russian embassy in Kabul, fled with four vehicles and a helicopter filled with cash. His destination wasn’t immediately revealed, though some reports have suggested he bolted to a neighboring country, like Uzbekistan or Tajikistan.
In a social media post from an unknown location, Ashraf Ghani, 72, claimed he had made his escape so as to save lots of lives, writing, “If I had stayed, countless of my countrymen would be martyred and Kabul would face destruction and switch into ruins that would result to a person’s catastrophe for its six million residents.”
Politicians and experts, however, say his sudden departure hampered negotiations for a smooth transfer of power with the Taliban — which Ghani left his own people within the lurch, facing chaos and dread a few return to the militant group’s brutal rule.
In a post on her Instagram Monday, Mariam Ghani said she was “angry and grieving and terribly afraid for family, friends & colleagues left behind in Afghanistan,” adding that she was “working feverishly to try to to anything I can on their behalf.”
It’s unclear whether Ghani, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in suburban Maryland, has heard from her dad or maybe knows where he’s .
While her dad worked within the Afghan government beginning in 2002 — before he was elected president first in 2014, then again in 2019 — Ghani was launching her art and teaching career.
Her work has since appeared in a number of the foremost renowned museums within the world, including the Guggenheim and MOMA in ny and therefore the Tate Modern in London. In 2018, she joined the school at Bennington College in Vermont.
Her first feature documentary, “What We Left Unfinished,” about five films that were started and left abandoned during the Communist era in Afghanistan, is now playing in select theaters.
“I grew up considerably in between cultures,” she said in her artist bio. “And that’s the position I work from as an artist.”
The daughter hasn’t publicly commented on her dad’s recent actions. during a 2015 ny Times article about her work, she said she thought he was “remarkable.”
“He’s always been an interesting person,” Mariam Ghani told the newspaper at the time, without elaborating.
Before he returned to Afghanistan in 2001, Ashraf Ghani — a tutorial who holds a doctorate from ny City’s Columbia University — worked at the UN and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development .
He and his wife, Rula Ghani, who is from Lebanon, raised their two kids, Mariam and Tarek, in Maryland, when Ashraf taught at Johns Hopkins University. Mariam Ghani attended ny University and therefore the School of Visual Arts.
Asked about growing up the daughter of a far off leader, Mariam Ghani told the days , “There’s many people within the art world who don’t know, which is preferable.”
The 2015 profile described Ghani as “a feminist, an archivist and an activist” who was “as well-versed within the politics of extraordinary rendition as she is within the very Brooklyn pursuit of homemade chile-passion-fruit sorbet.”
In her Instagram post Monday, Ghani didn’t specifically mention the plight of Afghan women — who are once more reporting being stop from school and work or potentially being forced into marriages with Taliban fighters.
She did, however, provide resources for people looking to assist Afghanistan residents, including by writing to elected officials within the US and by volunteering with or making donations to organizations helping refugees.
“To everyone who has checked in and reached call at solidarity over the past days: many thanks . it’s meant tons ,” she wrote. “I’m pretty burned out, but I hope I’ll be ready to reply to you all individually at some point.”