She added, “I think the place I identify most with is the border.”

With the opening of her new show on Thursday, “Like Water From a Stone,” at the Ryan Lee Gallery in Chelsea, people will see Ms. Ghani’s overlapping worlds and get a rare glimpse of the family intellectualism.

The title piece is a 20-minute film she shot in Norway that opens with a woman lying on a jagged rock beneath a cerulean sky, the wind rippling through her black dress as it does the pools of water below. The imagery evokes Norse seafaring myths in the age before oil became an industry and the awesome power of nature.

The second piece is a collaboration with her father, “Afghanistan: a Lexicon,” which was first shown at the Documenta art festival in Kassel, Germany, in 2012. The Ghanis wanted to show history in Afghanistan as a cycle of reform, revolt, collapse and recovery. Of the original lexicon’s 72 entries — with text and archival photos — 12 panels will be in the current show.

Father and daughter worked via Skype, agreeing that Ms. Ghani would have the final edits. “The tone would be in my wheelhouse: the speculative, poetic realm,” she said. Her father’s contribution would be his deep and abiding knowledge of Afghanistan.

Mr. Ghani, who met his wife at the American University of Beirut, received his doctorate at Columbia. Ms. Ghani was born in New York in 1978; her brother, Tarek, three years later. They had a serene suburban Maryland childhood while Mr. Ghani taught at Johns Hopkins University. Ms. Ghani earned degrees from New York University and the School of Visual Arts. Her father, after working at the World Bank, returned to Afghanistan in 2002, becoming a finance minister for President Hamid Karzai, running unsuccessfully for president in 2009 and then winning a disputed runoff last year.

“He is a remarkable person,” Ms. Ghani said, refusing to elaborate, wary of the attention or of saying anything to compromise her father’s position. “And he’s always been a remarkable person.”