The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to announce Hangama Amiri: A Homage to Home, the first solo museum exhibition of work by the Afghan Canadian artist. Amiri’s work combines painting and printmaking techniques with textiles—weaving together stories based on memories of her homeland and her diasporic experience. Hangama Amiri: A Homage to Home will be on view at The Aldrich from February 5 to June 11, 2023.
Hangama Amiri fled Kabul, Afghanistan with her family in 1996 when she was seven years old. After moving through numerous countries over several years, they immigrated to Canada in 2005 when Amiri was a teenager. 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.
With fabrics sourced from an Afghan-owned shop in New York City’s fashion district, Amiri uses collage techniques to create large-scaled works with frayed edges. 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.
For A Homage to Home, Amiri will debut more than a dozen new textile works and a neon sculpture. 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 was born in 1989 in Peshawar, Pakistan and lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. Amiri received her MFA from Yale University in Painting and Printmaking and her BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was a Canadian Fulbright and Postgraduate Fellow at Yale University School of Arts and Sciences. She has mounted solo exhibitions of her work nationally and internationally at the David B. Smith Gallery, Denver; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Albertz Benda Gallery, New York; and T293 Gallery, Rome.
Hangama Amiri: A Homage to Home is curated by the Museum’s Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart.