New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
AN HOMAGE TO HOME
New Haven artist depicts memories and hopes for Afghanistan through fiber art at Aldrich show
A month before today’s opening of her solo exhibit at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, the transplanted Afghan artist Hangama Amiri had all her pieces packed and ready to go in her New Haven studio.
The exhibit, “Hangama Amiri: A Homage to Home,” will be her first in a museum and also large, filling three first floor galleries. Yet Amiri had managed to fit almost everything into a few storage containers, a miracle of portability that anticipates the exhibit itself. She considers herself an artist of diaspora and hopes viewers will feel like visitors to her lost home, temporarily rebuilt, almost full scale, from foldable textiles.
One of her more modest Aldrich creations stretches 11 feet wide and shows uniformly dressed young women pacing in the courtyard of the kind of school from which they are now barred by the resurgent Taliban.
“They are dispersing,” Amiri said, describing the women. “What will the future be of this post-war generation? Which is the same thing that happened to me back in the nineties. I was removed from my own school, when the Taliban came in and I started being a refugee.”
The year was 1996, the end of a civil war marked by the Taliban’s advance on Kabul. “The entire community was under threat, because the next morning, if you didn’t flee, the Taliban would come. It was get out, get out to save your lives,” she said.
Amiri was in the first grade, the third youngest of four children. Her family was Tajik, an ethnic minority long at odds with the Pashtun-dominant Tali
ban. They fled first to Pakistan, then to Tajikistan in Central Asia before settling in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2005.
“Whatever happened in the 90s, it’s even worse what’s happening right now,” Amiri said. “All the promises they [the Taliban] made, it’s the opposite. They always eliminate women’s rights, in every possible way.”
Almost as she spoke, the latest news from Afghanistan was that the Taliban government had banned women from working with aid groups, raising the risk of hunger and disease. This followed similar bans from jobs, schools and public parks.
Amiri last visited Afghanistan about 10 years ago, when the Taliban was in retreat. But she said the work for the Aldrich exhibit was mostly done in response to the country’s “awful collapse” in 2021. Nevertheless, she sees the exhibit as hopeful; “an amalgamation of childhood memories” deployed in tribute to the resiliency of Afghan women under threat of “erasure.”
She recalled that her own daily walk to school took her through a bazaar where one of her favorite uncles owned a tailor shop. “These are the foundations of my interests and how I came to be a fabric artist,” Amiri said.
Her largest exhibit pieces (at 20, 19 and 14 feet wide respectively) reimagine that bazaar, as well as a beauty salon and a tailor shop. In one gallery, wires will be strung overhead as in an actual outdoor market.
“It’s creating an environment,” Amiri said, describing the way the giant pieces would be hung. “When you move around or among them you feel like an inbetween figure. They are very bodily engaging art works, as if you want to be inside, but somehow it also wants to push you back. So that plays with reality and imagined spaces.”
A recent Yale Art school graduate, she said she finds her fabrics in the New York fashion district and as well as the places she has lived or visited in her travels. “It shows the demography of my own identity, who I am as an artist,” she said.
Amiri unpacked one of her smaller pieces, a beauty salon poster, to show how she made it. She began with a paper pattern and “lots of pins” and ultimately stitched the many elements together. A banner in Farsi on the salon poster was six feet long, but Amiri said she can only manage three or four feet on her sewing machine.
“It’s as wide as my arms can reach,” she said. “At the end, they become so big that when I join them together, my body becomes so small, because the textile becomes so much heavier than my body. But that’s the process I love.”
Amiri’s exhibit runs until May at the Aldrich Museum, overlapping with “Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art” which also opens Sunday.