Hangama Amiri creates intricately layered textile compositions that muse on home, kinship, and memory. PARTING/فراق builds on an ongoing body of work that focuses on the artist’s personal history and diasporic experience. Following the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Amiri and her family fled their home in Kabul in 1996, which necessitated a period of familial separation. Her father worked in Norway and later Denmark, while Amiri lived in Dushambe, 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; messages 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. For instance, Woman Before a Mirror recalls a photograph of Amiri’s mother standing in a favourite outfit in the primary bedroom of their Dushambe apartment. The details are intensely specific to this period of her life: the bedroom’s wallpaper and furnishings evoke the prevalence of Soviet-era interior design and architecture in Tajikistan, a former Soviet Republic. Elsewhere, Man with Tulips is an imagined portrait of Amiri’s father in an apartment in Norway, where he worked for a tulip producer. His tender embrace of the flowers in their vase speaks to their symbolic import as a source of income for the family, and situates them as a proxy for his labour and care.   

Amiri’s process is one of multiple translations. She begins each work by creating a black and white sketch, which is then rendered in colour, sometimes with notes indicating possible textile or colour swatches. The colour sketches are then distilled and enlarged into detailed handmade patterns, which become the basis for the final work; textile collages that combine painting, printmaking, quilting, and appliqué techniques. Amiri 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 nods to familial bonds – her mother taught her to sew, and her uncle was a tailor – and to long, diverse histories of feminist textile-based practices.  

The resulting work can be read as the expression and excavation of memory, connection, and kinship through material and process. The family photographs and memories that form the basis of this body of work are twice translated: once through listening and remembrance, and again through material and gesture. Through the shared labour of conversations and collective remembering, Amiri’s parents become crucial collaborators to her work. Amiri’s process is also a profound act of witnessing: it necessitates that she witness her parents’ histories, and revisit childhood memories through the gaze of an adult. We, as viewers, are asked to witness their familial history as well. Cumulatively, Amiri’s work celebrates and witnesses the immense labour required to care for a family amidst the trauma of migration and separation, and the bonds that connect kin across space and time.