Hangama Amiri Interviewed in Guernica Magazine

Back Draft: Hangama Amiri

By Hua Xi

Hangama Amiri is an Afghan Canadian artist whose fabric installations reflect and refract. Her life-sized tapestries, collected in “Bazaar, A Recollection of Home,” recreate apartment blocks and shopping districts in her home country of Afghanistan, reinvented and distorted through the lens of memory. Using a wide range of textiles in many textures, Amiri creates kaleidoscopic collages of vibrant and varied patterns, arranged in eye-catching compositions that invite meditations on the fragmentary nature of memory and on how we recreate our own pasts from pieces of the present.

Originally a painter, Amiri opts for a distinctively flattened composition that pulls different dimensions of space onto the same visual plane. In “Bazaar, A Recollection of Home,” places push up against each other, intersecting and overlapping. Every available space is filled with some design or motif, suggesting a crowded and many-layered relationship to the past. She excavates memories that are not only personal but engaged with how sociopolitical events have shaped her family’s history in Afghanistan.

Amiri researches places she remembers from childhood, looking up photos online and collecting cultural artifacts. In this way, she revisits old memories and discovers new aspects of them. Her final pieces are both reflective of history and highly contemporary, hybrids of multiple eras. I spoke to Amiri about the central piece and largest in “Bazaar, A Recollection of Home” — a depiction of several connected shops titled “Bazaar” (pictured above).

Guernica: Your final pieces involve a range of materials, but where do these visuals begin for you? Do they begin on paper?

Hangama Amiri: I start first with sketches, small drawings. I still have the drawing for “Bazaar” here with me on the wall. This piece came through a kind of understanding about collective memory, and these memories I had as a child of Afghanistan.

Textiles are very tactile. They’re very related to smell, to touch. They’re a very seductive material. So it really works when I incorporate personal memories, fragile memories, and connect them to the fabric’s qualities.

Guernica: Are there specific moments in memory that you are drawing on?

Amiri: “Bazaar, A Recollection of Home” is based on growing up around the bazaar environment. When I was in Afghanistan — between 1994 and 1996, before the Taliban came — we used to live in a very small neighborhood in Kabul, the Macroyan Kohna. It consisted of these building complexes built by Russians where a lot of middle-class Afghan families could afford to live, and these communities also had little markets and little bazaars. Growing up, we would go to the bazaar, and the memory of seeing the stores and the fabrics was my first inspiration for this piece.

One of my uncles was also a tailor, and I used to visit his shop in the mornings before school. Being in his shop, I was very inspired to see how people worked: seeing the scissors, seeing all these beautiful cotton fabrics that he’d receive from neighbors or from clients. So this idea of the community created by the bazaar really influenced me, and this idea of how a neighborhood comes together.

Guernica: Your works flatten and compress space in really interesting ways. Does that reflect your memories of the bazaar?

Amiri: A lot of bazaars are market environments. The shops are built on the street level of these buildings and they’re all side by side and they’re very cramped together but still have this narrow passage in between that people can walk through. I wanted to create a panoramic piece that suggested all these stores side by side, and that also gave you a bodily engagement with the world. Since this piece is also life-sized, it’s very immersive. When you walk up to it, you feel like you are in this fabric shop, seeing how the fabrics are hung.

[…]

To read the full interview visit Guernica

For more information about Hangama Amiri please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com

+1.416.531.8000

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Hangama Amiri Interviewed in Guernica Magazine

September 12, 2022