Open Session #20: Hosted by Mariam Ghani

Artist Mariam Ghani convenes an evening of conversation around her current work-in-progress Angle of Incidence, which is an essay and film about her great uncle, the Lebanese architect, engineer, and educator Raymond Ghosn. Ghosn attended MIT before returning to Lebanon to help launch the American University of Beirut’s Architectural Engineering Faculty in 1952, then designing and launching its influential BArch program in 1963. He served as Dean of AUB’s School of Engineering and Architecture from 1965 until his death in 1976, when he was shot on the campus by a former student, one of 200 who had been expelled after a tumultuous protest in 1974. Ghani will share a partial cut of the film, which combines imagery from some of Ray’s buildings with texts found in his personal archives and other material. In an informal discussion she will draw out some of the larger themes and contexts of the project, including the role of architecture in post-colonial Lebanese national imaginary, the ruptures caused by the civil war, the present-day resonances of modernist buildings, and diasporic relationships to home.

Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Some of her previous projects include a city choreography of Sharjah, a documentation of the post-conflict reconstruction of Kabul at one-year intervals, and a two-channel video tracking through buildings in Kassel and Kabul with near-identical layouts and entangled histories. Her feature films have been distributed internationally and her shorts, public projects, photographs, and installations have been widely presented and collected, notably in Times Square and LaGuardia Airport; the Tate Modern, Guggenheim, MoMA, Smithsonian and Metropolitan Museums; the CCCB in Barcelona and the Secession in Vienna; Documenta 13, the Dhaka Art Summit, and the Liverpool, Lahore, Yinchuan, and Sharjah Biennials; and the Berlinale, Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, SFFILM, DOC NYC, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Jih.lava, BlackStar, and Ann Arbor film festivals. Museum solo shows include the St. Louis Art Museum, the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, the Schneider Museum in Oregon, the Speed Museum in Louisville, and the Queens Museum of Art in NYC. Ghani is a recent MacDowell and Guggenheim Fellow, among other awards, and teaches film/video at Bennington College.

Ziad Jamaleddine is an Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP and co-founder and partner of L.E.FT Architects, based in New York and Beirut. Jamaleddine is a practitioner and scholar with a particular research focus on architecture in the Middle East—rigorously interrogating topics such as religious architecture and religiosity in public space, urbanism and infrastructure in relation to water resources and scarcity, and the question of reconstruction in post-war cities. His writings have been published in The Arab City: Architecture and Representation (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016), Places Journal (2020), Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World (2024), and International Journal of Islamic Architecture (2025). His historical research on the architectural typology of the mosque was presented at several cultural venues, including Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016), Milan Triennale (2019), Sharjah Architecture Triennale (2019), and Jeddah Islamic Arts Biennale (2023).