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.
Amiri and her family fled Kabul in 1996. The family was separated for nearly ten years until they reunited in Halifax in 2005.