Quiet Resistance in NEWCOMER –
Hangama Amiri received the Goslar Kaiserring Scholarship 2023
Hangama Amiri received the Kaiserring Scholarship 2023. Impressive wall hangings interweave cross-generational sewing traditions and cultural memories. With her textile collages, the artist gives us a glimpse into the everyday lives of women in her home country and in exile.
Hangama Amiri works predominantly with textiles and yet her pictures look like paintings transformed into fabric. The artist sews together numerous colorful fabrics using the collage technique and uses them to create nuanced light and shadow values. The wall hangings show women sitting together in private interiors, in conversation, eating together. Embroidered chiffons refer to the domestic activity of sewing, a tradition that has been passed down through the generations. Through the painterly use of colors and materials, the artist shows how everyday objects are imbued with cultural memories. Through her work, she aims to relate to these women who, in the midst of great instability, nevertheless strive for progressive change.
Hangama Amiri lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. She grew up in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan before immigrating to Canada with her parents in 2005. She completed her studies in Halifax and at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut, where she graduated from the Department of Painting and Printmaking in 2020.
During her master's degree at Yale, she asked herself whether the textile medium would not be better suited to expressing what is important to her in her art. Especially since fabrics and needles, like paper and pencils, have accompanied her from an early age to the present day. Hangama Amiri was awarded the Goslar Kaiserring Scholarship for the year 2023, which has been promoted by the Verein zur Förderung Moderner Kunst since 1984 and has been sponsored by the AKB Foundation in Einbeck since 2014.
As part of this scholarship award, the artist opened her exhibition at the Mönchehaus Museum in Goslar in September 2023. Since Thursday, February 22nd, 2024 you can also be enchanted and touched by the exhibition in the NEWCOMER KWS Art Lounge.
Many thanks to Hangama Amiri for a touching exhibition, which you can now visit in the NEWCOMER rooms until May 12th.
Everyday life for women in Afghanistan
Hangama Amiri's textile works are characterized by the sewn collage technique of colourful materials that explore the feeling of home. Amiri's works reflect how gender roles, social norms and wider geopolitical struggles shape the lives of women in Afghanistan and the diaspora. Through the use of textiles as an artistic medium, Amiri illuminates and questions these issues of women "nonetheless striving for progressive change amidst great instability".
Artworks: Women Chatting, 2023 and Portrait of Two Artists looking at Art Book, 2023 Courtesy: Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto
Hangama Amiri, Noon, Still-life with Salad and Qabeli Palaw, 2023* Courtesy: Cooper Cole Galley, Toronto
Hangama Amiri, Mehmani Guests, 2022* Courtesy: Cooper Cole Galley, Toronto
About the artist
Hangama Amiri (*1989, Peshawar, Pakistan) lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, after immigrating to Canada in 2005. She is a graduate of Yale University with an MFA – Master of Fine Arts – in Painting and Printmaking. She was a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Scholar at the Yale School of Art and Sciences.
Amiri's art focuses mainly on textiles to explore the notion of home and question how gender, social norms and geopolitical conflicts shape the daily lives of women in Afghanistan and the diaspora. Her figurative works reflect a strong interest in the power of representation, especially through everyday objects such as passports, vases or celebrity postcards.
Hangama Amiri*
*Use of images: Use is permitted for editorial articles about KWS, provided the source is quoted. Commercial distribution to third parties is not permitted.
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