Opening February 5 at The Aldrich: Hangama Amiri and Prima Materia

Opening February 5: Hangama Amiri A Homage to Home and Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art 

A Homage to Home is Afghan Canadian artist Hangama Amiri’s solo museum debut, unveiling a new body of work specially created for The Aldrich. Amiri’s work combines painting and printmaking techniques with textiles—weaving together stories based on memories of her homeland and her diasporic experience. Her choice of materials stems from autobiographical origins—her mother taught her to sew, her uncle was a tailor, and her textiles reference the colors, fabrics, and content she remembers from the bazaars and the streets of Kabul.

Her textile works are made from layering fabrics—piecing and sewing them together—and then painting and embroidering on the surfaces. Together, the fragments collectively characterize her home from a distance. Taking form as both intimate interiors and monumental installations, Amiri synthesizes postwar and present-day Afghanistan with refugee life, merging memory and lived experience. Her meta-worlds are centered on the lives of women and share storylines that monumentalize their personal resilience and public resistance. She captures her female protagonists within domestic and entrepreneurial spaces to amplify a collective struggle for women’s rights in Afghanistan and around the world.

Hangama Amiri: A Homage to Home is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator and will be accompanied by the artist’s first museum publication.
 
Hangama Amiri: A Homage to Home will be on view through June 11, 2023.

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Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art is a group exhibition that links individual works of art with an element from the periodic table which each work incorporates. Superficially, the exhibition’s foundation is science, but through expansive curatorial choices the project will reveal the material basis for sociological, emotional, political, and even spiritual subject matter. There are currently 118 elements in the periodic table, many of them extremely rare or man-made. The exhibition will focus on approximately twenty common elements that are linked with significant and diverse works of art. A subtext that will be explored in the project is resource extraction, which will be incorporated through works that speak about the mining and refining industry and its legacy. 

Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art is curated by independent curator and artist Richard Klein, The Aldrich's former Exhibitions Director.

Advance ticket reservations recommended, please visit thealdrich.org to plan your visit.