For such a young artist, Hangama Amiri’s career has already had many shining moments. We are happy to announce that more of those moments will be happening for her this year. Following a group show at the Laurie Swim Gallery, Lunenburg, NS, coming up in September, Hangama will be featured in a Solo Exhibition, this November, at Gallery T295 in Rome, Italy.
"As an Afghan refugee woman, I produce textile works that evoke my personal diaspora as a means to investigate the politics of gender in Islamic culture, while also celebrating feminine subjects that have been deemed taboo. My work begins by culling fabrics from stores in New York, which are imported from markets in India and bazaars in Afghanistan. I then cut and stitch together various textiles, fabrics, and clothing into visually seductive compositions as a way of celebrating Afghan women’s feminism and identities in visual art. The act of sewing these different sources together in my work becomes a metaphor for uniting fragmented identities that have had to live in multiple geographies around the world. In my fabric installations, I choose to not only forefront women-dominated spaces, such as beauty parlors, but also subversive depictions of items banned by the Taliban, such as red lipstick, shiny fabrics, and nail polish. I use these symbols to give Afghan women a sense of freedom and power in their own sensuality, sexuality, desire, and pleasure; this is in contrast to the Islamic norms of women’s bodies being something very private, secret, and hidden behind a veil.” — Hangama Amiri
Hangama Amiri received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax NS in 2012. She was a Canadian Fulbright Scholar and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale University School of Art and Science in New Haven CT from 2015-2016. She has exhibited her paintings nationally and internationally recently in New York City, Toronto, France, Italy, London (UK), and Sofia, Bulgaria. Amiri won the 2013 Portia White Protégé Award, and in 2015, her painting Island of Dreams won Honourable Mention at the RBC Canadian Painting Competition.
In 2018 she had been selected by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia as the inaugural recipient of the Elizabeth Connor Endowment which is awarded to a current or recent NSCAD graduate who fits the criteria of an artist who is innovative, forward-thinking, and inclusive. The curatorial team has selected works that will be in the permanent collection of the AGNS. She was an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity Independent Residency Program (Fall 2017) followed by Joya AiR Residency Program in Almeria, Andalucía, Spain (Winter 2017) and at World of CO Residency Program in Sofia, Bulgaria (Spring 2018). Hangama is currently attending the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut (2018-2020) to complete her MFA in Painting/Printmaking.
