In ‘Kabul: Partial Reconstructions 2002-2007’ a three year document to the post-conflict reconstructions of the city of Kabul, interactivity and public dialogue became central to her work. From these foundations Mariam Ghani’s work broadened into a more general investigation into the processes of documenting and collecting data itself. She coined the term ‘warm data’, which she uses to differentiate and juxtapose hard factual information typical of legal and bureaucratic systems with the unquantifiable aspects of human life. These ideas lie at the centre of her web-based project ‘How do you see the disappeared?’ (2004).
Mariam’s processes of capturing, rearranging and questioning seemingly neutral data is further explored in the work ‘Going, Going, Gone’, which she describes as follows: ‘New York in this moment reminds me, as it never has before, of Berlin in the different moments that I’ve known it, from the 90s through now - with the curious difference that very few people here seem to notice the walls crumbling around them, or think to scale the barriers protecting the monuments of capitalism. It’s as if New York just keeps smiling that pageant-queen smile, and half the people who look at her don’t notice the missing teeth. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered why...’