Hangama Amiri creates intricately layered textile compositions that muse on kinship, memory, and the meaning of home. PARTING/فراق extends on an ongoing body of work that focuses on the artist’s personal history and diasporic experience. Amiri and her family fled their home in Kabul in 1996, which necessitated a period of familial separation. Her father sought asylum in Denmark and later Norway, while Amiri lived in Tajikistan with her mother and three siblings, before the family settled together in Halifax in 2005. This nine-year separation was marked by the frequent exchange of letters, snapshots, and gifts; missives that outlined the contours of her family’s lives and offered glimpses into jobs, celebrations, or daily acts of care.

In the present, Amiri mines this archive of family photos, material fragments, and memories, translating them into lushly detailed textile collages that focus on her parents. She carefully selects textiles that speak to the specificity of her personal history, acknowledging the ways in which textiles, through their uniquely close relationship to home and the body, become perfumed with meaning and memory over time. Amiri’s focus on textiles also nod to familial bonds—her mother taught her to sew—and to long, diverse histories of feminist textile-based practices. Through PARTING/فراق , Amiri offers viewers access to her memories and diasporic experience: her familial history becomes shared knowledge. Amiri’s work celebrates and witnesses the immense labour required to care for a family amidst migration and separation, and the bonds that connect kin across space and time.

Organized and circulated by Esker Foundation, Calgary.

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Image: Hangama Amiri, Man With Vase of Tulips, 2024. Muslin, cotton, chiffon, velvet, polyester, silk, suede, and linen, 62.5″ x 53.5″.Courtesy of the artist and T293, Rome. Photo by Blaine Campbell.