RIDGEFIELD, CONN.- Afghan Canadian artist Hangama Amiri combines painting and printmaking techniques with textiles, weaving together stories based on memories of her homeland and her diasporic experience. Amiri fled Kabul with her family in 1996 when she was seven years old. Moving through numerous countries over several years, they immigrated to Canada in 2005 when Amiri was a teenager. Amiri’s choice of materials stems from autobiographical origins—her mother taught her to sew and her uncle was a tailor. Her textiles also reference the colors and fabrics she remembers in the bazaars and on the streets in Kabul. She sources her materials from an Afghan-owned shop in New York City’s fashion district, collaging with fabric and painting on the surfaces. Large-scaled with frayed edges, Amiri’s textile works are made from layering fabrics, piecing and sewing them together, so the fragments collectively characterize her home from a distance. Centered on the lives of women, she builds interiors that capture her protagonists within domestic and entrepreneurial spaces and amplify a collective struggle for women’s rights in Afghanistan and around the world.

This exhibition is the artist’s solo museum debut and will unveil a new body of work specially made for The Aldrich. It will span the entirety of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s first floor galleries and will be accompanied by the artist’s first museum publication, with an essay by the exhibition’s curator, Amy Smith-Stewart.

Hangama Amiri: A Homage to Home is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

Hangama Amiri was born in 1989 in Peshawar, Pakistan and lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. Amiri received her MFA from Yale University in Painting and Printmaking and her BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was a Canadian Fulbright and Postgraduate Fellow at Yale University School of Arts and Sciences. She has mounted solo exhibitions of her work nationally and internationally at the David B. Smith Gallery, Denver; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Albertz Benda gallery, New York; and T293 Gallery, Rome.