The artist draws on her Afghan heritage and the literal folds of everyday textiles to explore and affirm both her own identity and that of her countrywomen.
The Afghan-Canadian textile artist Hangama Amiri did not have an easy start in life. She was born in Peshawar, Pakistan in 1989, after her family had fled the first Afghan civil war. When the situation had cooled down, she went back to her country of origin, growing up in Kabul – only to relocate back to Peshawar upon the rise of the Taliban regime in 1996. She resided in the Pakistani city for a while before later moving to neighbouring Tajikistan in 1999. She recalls how her family were “free refugees” there, integrating with the local community.
While her father was seeking asylum in Europe, Amiri stayed behind in Tajikistan with her mother, who encouraged her education. In 2005, her family applied successfully for citizenship in Canada, where they had to start from scratch in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Despite the instability and disruption of her upbringing, the soft-spoken artist, whose Urdu name means “the person who makes noises at parties”, is still able to look back at it all with a gentle smile and a few words of wisdom.
“There were a lot of journeys of struggle, I would say. But, here I am, still pursuing my art and what I love,” she tells Canvas from New Haven, Connecticut, where she now lives. “Those small precious moments and hardship experiences made me who I am today.” However, during those times spent moving around and crossing borders there were also happy days, times of creativity and joy, which were to leave a mark on her life and encourage her path towards art.
Image courtesy of the artist
Amiri recalls how she would roam around the busy bazaars in Kabul – sites that are still vivid in her memory – and how she was close to her male and female family members, some of whom were artists. She made her first portraits back then. “Even though they were really bad drawings, I just so fell in love with putting pencil on paper, like a simple gesture,” she explains. In Tajikistan, she enrolled at an art college supported by UNICEF and somewhere that offered her creative freedom. “It was a space for me to really express feelings that I couldn’t say in words, but I could actually start painting them.”
It was Amiri’s family who opened her eyes to the excitingly endless and tactile world of textiles, which predominantly informs her practice today. Her mother introduced her to sewing, and when Eid celebrations were around the corner, she and her aunts would buy a variety of fabrics from local stores, later fashioning their own stylish dresses. Her uncle was a tailor himself, who owned a shop near her school. Amiri would often pass by, watching and learning what was going on in the workshop. “I always tell my audiences that I didn’t grow up being very wealthy or having much access to materials,” she says. “All I had was from literally going outside and finding everyday objects such as cloths and fabrics, with which we would then make small dolls. That was my touch, and also my first introduction to how material works and how fabric functions.”
In Amiri’s view, a piece of textile has “so much role and power” as a symbol of taste and beauty. Yet there is also a political angle, especially in Afghanistan where, since the return of the Taliban, the dress code for women is once again restricted and constantly monitored. “It’s as if the fabric itself has become a kind of fearful material for Afghan women, rather than something that they can feel good in and celebrate themselves with, whether outside or inside their homes,” observes Amiri.
Image courtesy of the artist
Cloth has always been a politicised medium. Amiri points out how prominent it has been in the ongoing protests over the atrocities unfolding in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine. “People rip off their shirts and write something,” she notes. “That becomes a political gesture and holds a lot of power in the public spectrum. Cloth is a very fragile, cheap material, yet it has an enormous amount of strength and potency in everyday politics. It can also be a very hopeful medium.”
Many of Amiri’s fabric artworks, which have been showcased at the Aga Khan Museum, the Sharjah Biennial and Hayy Jameel, are colourful portrayals of her adolescent memories. They are like snapshots of places, people, special events, everyday life and personal items, from plates to suitcases. “I work from memory, which has never been perfect,” she explains. She is never in doubt though about her identity. “I feel like, even though I left Afghanistan, Afghanistan has never left me – or the culture has never left me. I’ve always been surrounded by Afghans, by that happiness, by the language as well, and the visual memories. The Afghan people have so many stories to tell, and they want to share it with you. It’s like a way of passing on history, from generation to generation. I truly value those moments.”
Amiri is particularly inspired by reading and going on museum visits, which often act as the first references for her sketching out her compositions. When creating her pieces, she uses the needlework technique known as appliqué, creating an assemblage or collage of fabrics by cutting out different shapes and forms and sewing them onto another fabric. “My entire body is working,” she says of her process. “It’s not only me looking at or just working on one fabric at a time. It’s like everything is in motion.”
One of her most personal projects is Bazaar, A Recollection of Home (2020), which took nearly one year to complete. It comprises expansive and panoramic wall-based pieces that depict attractive storefronts, full of fabric rolls and calligraphic typography. Especially significant are the inclusion of the beauty salons in Afghan markets that the artist encountered during her youth (and which have since been closed on the orders of the Taliban). The work is also a commentary on globalisation, consumerism and Western cultural influences. The multi-layered pieces are not only pictorially detailed, but made from a variety of different material sources, including cotton, chiffon, muslin, silk and tablecloth linen, among others, to give a diverse and dynamic textured effect.
More broadly, Amiri is also breaking down Western stereotypes of Afghani women, who are mostly portrayed in the media through a political lens. “Having this sort of representation in my work is a little shocking for some people, as if they would never have imagined our women being so beautiful, wearing such colourful dresses and bright nail polish,” she adds. “I wasn’t doing this intentionally, but somehow it has brought up a new conversation.” She relishes the opportunity to extend the debate about her country and its women in particular. “It’s a privilege to bring in these contemporary nuances,” she continues. “Yes, we wear fashionable clothes. Yes, we celebrate pop culture. We actually have our own pop culture. It’s just that the world has not given us a space in which to speak or show our culture, so I’m here to show it to you.”
The fabrics that Amiri and her studio assistants work with hail from the long-held epicentres of weaving: Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan and Turkey. For the artist, touching such delicate materials is an intimate way of connecting with her home – or making a new one for herself as a diasporic artist. “The sense of touching, cutting and putting them together is a very metaphoric space for me,” she says. “I feel like I belong – this is the home that I am putting together.”
