Hangama Amiri at Esker in Calgary

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Hangama Amiri, “Man with Vase of Tulips,” 2024 (courtesy of the artist and T293, Rome)

Afghan-Canadian artist Hangama Amiri blends painting, printmaking, and textile techniques to create colourful and intricately layered fabric vignettes inspired by familial memories, her homeland, and the diasporic experience. 

Her exhibition, PARTING/فراق, on view at Esker Foundation in Calgary until April 27, brings together her large-scale textile collages in juxtaposition to a fleet of pencil sketches and colour studies, offering an intimate glimpse into her creative process. Her large-scale collages, with frayed edges and overlapping layers, are rich in visual storytelling and painterly inflections.

Treating fabric like paint, Amiri threads together stories, which are exquisitely infused with colour, texture, and light. Her process is laborious. She combines cues from painting’s historical vocabulary with that of a skilled couturier to reimagine family memories through fabrics in various textures, patterns and sheens.

In a studio overflowing with fabrics, Amiri crafts larger-than-life vignettes by collaging and layering pieces of fabric into vividly lush renderings. She first enlarges and transposes her small sketches onto brown paper, mapping the patterns that will comprise her compositions. The next stage involves pinning fabric pieces onto muslim, experimenting with placement and composition. Once the arrangement is done, the pieces are sewn together mostly by hand, with more intricate areas sewn by an embroidery machine.

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Hangama Amira, “Man Resting in the Park,” 2022 (courtesy of the artist and T293, Rome)

Each piece is a patchwork of experience, both fragmented and cohesive, and mirroring the way memory functions for those in the diaspora. These arrangements are uncanny in how they seamlessly mimic painting through Amiri’s ingenious strokes of colour, a cast shadow, or how light might shimmer through the glass in a window.

For example, Portrait of a Woman with Her Son, is a vibrant yet soothing symphony of pattern and colour. Using her signature fabric appliqué, Amari selects and pieces textiles together that reveal an intimate moment between mother and son, evoking comfort and safety. With a painterly sensibility, she achieves nuanced hues from the soft draping purple curtains set against comforting pink walls rooted to a floor made from earthy browns. The window behind shimmers with an iridescent sky blue that evokes hope, freedom and optimism.

Originally a painter, Amiri’s shift to textiles emerged during her MFA studies at Yale. While there, she found inspiration from Pop legend Claes Oldenburg’s work, contrasting a subtle playfulness with longing and defiance, a signature in her work that’s rooted in diaspora and her long-distance resistance to the Taliban.

As highlighted here, Amiri’s journey into textiles is profoundly personal and political. When the Taliban seized control in 1996, Amiri fled Kabul with her family at the age of seven and found herself grappling with displacement and separation. Her father found work in Denmark and later Norway, while Amiri, along with her mother and three siblings, went to Pakistan and then settled in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. It wasn’t until 2005 that the family finally reunited in Halifax. 

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Hangama Amiri, “Portrait of a Woman with Denim Jacket,” 2023 (photo courtesy of the artist)

Her mother, who taught her to sew, and her uncle, a tailor, provided the foundational skills for her journey into textiles. Sourcing materials from an Afghan-owned shop in New York City’s fashion district, Amiri bridges geographical and cultural divides through layered and juxtaposed patterns, textures and colours to achieve depth and evocations that bring her subjects to life. Smooth velvets for tulips, shimmering gold for a necklace, and intricate laces or bold stripes for her mother’s clothing.

Amiri’s work highlights the enduring bonds between loved ones across distance and time. These richly nuanced narratives–stitched together with love, loss, and longing–open a space for viewers to reflect on the complexities and challenges of the Afghan diaspora through enduring concepts of home, memory, identity and belonging. ■

Hangama Amiri, PARTING/فراق, is on view at Esker Foundation in Calgary until April 27.

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