Rama Ghanem

Rama Ghamen

I'll send you the pictures, 2024
Single-channel digital video, color, sound
15 minutes, 30 seconds
Courtesy of the artist

Rama Ghanem (b. 1998) is a Dubai-born, New York-based artist working with moving image, photography, text, and sound. Ghanem is a research fellow at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. She holds a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is an alum of the Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship, a program developed in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design.

Engaging with the ideological work of archives, I insist on a structure for something indefinite, absurd and slippery. I want to see the ways image, memory and language resist closure.

Some of this unfolds in an untitled, long-term research project about my family’s entanglement with the looting of Palestinian heritage and the transfer of archaeological objects from the West Bank into the collections of religious institutions and museums across the United States. I cannot excavate the past, so I negotiate it instead, positioning myself as an interloper within the institutions that invent and sanction it. This birthed several episodic moving image works, including A Cave Is a Pinhole (2025)—a film that explores the photograph and document as a process, attempting to encounter an image of loss that does not reflect the past, but actively participates in its unfolding. The research and interventions present the archive as both fragment and whole, offering a site where those who look can revise limits imposed by time, power, and authority. In Common Desire (2020-), sex, war and image are entangled together in an anthology of video works appropriating digitized archives that point to cultural transformations and revolutions that apexed during the Lebanese Civil War. I allow the public domain image to lean into entropy as it chooses, collapsing mythologies or building new ones around the interpretive axes of a historical moment.