Hangama Amiri: Befarmā / After You

OPENING RECEPTION SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 6-8PM

Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present Befarmā / After You, a solo exhibition featuring new fiber-based works by Hangama Amiri. This marks the artist’s West Coast debut.

Amiri is an Afghan Canadian artist whose practice combines painting, drawing, and printmaking techniques with textiles, weaving together stories rooted in memories of her homeland and her diasporic experience. Her works explore notions of home, community, gender, and cultural memory, examining quotidian objects and scenes imbued with geopolitical significance.

The exhibition’s title, Befarmā, derives from a Farsi word frequently used in hosting and hospitality. Loosely translating to “please help yourself” or “after you,” it is commonly heard in communal settings such as meals and tea gatherings. In Amiri’s newest works, the viewer is positioned from a first-person perspective, looking at a table set before them. The table holds a mix of items from both her home country of Afghanistan and the Western cities where she has lived. Dishes like Qabuli Palaw and Seekh Kebab sit alongside items such as Sharab (wine), Ashtaq (apricot), Seer (garlic), and Saeb (apple), all arranged on a Dastarkhwān (tablecloth). Many of these works are inspired by actual meals Amiri has shared with friends and family—sites of communal exchange where conversations about life, art, and politics unfold.

Amiri employs a painterly approach to color and materials, combining fiber, block printing, and colored pencil. Her choice of materials is deeply autobiographical. Fleeing Kabul with her family in 1996 at the age of seven, she moved through multiple countries before immigrating to Canada in 2005. During this time, her mother taught her to sew, and her uncle worked as a tailor. The colors and fabrics in her work reference the textiles she remembers from Kabul’s bazaars and streets. Amiri constructs her textile pieces by layering, piecing, and sewing together fabrics to create intricate still lives, portraits, and environments. In Befarmā, she further expands the complexity of her surfaces, incorporating block printing, hand painting, and hand-drawn elements.

The works in Befarmā place the viewer in the intimate yet charged space of communal exchange, where personal histories intersect with broader sociopolitical realities. Whether depicting spaces of family gatherings or collective resistance, these settings become sites of care, negotiation, and deep listening. Amiri’s intricate textile compositions bridge the tactile and the conceptual, seamlessly intertwining traditions of craft with contemporary dialogues on gender, migration, and memory.  In Befarmā, she invites us to see the table not merely as a place of nourishment, but as a stage for storytelling and cultural continuity—where the personal and political converge.

Hangama Amiri (b. 1989, Peshawar, Pakistan) received an MFA from Yale University School of Art (2020) and a BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale University School of Art and Sciences (2015–2016) and has completed residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity; Joya AiR Residency Program in Almería, Spain; World of CO Residency in Sofia, Bulgaria; and Long Road Projects in Jacksonville, Florida. Her awards include the 2011 Lieutenant Governor’s Community Volunteerism Award, RBC Painting Competition 2015, and the 2013 Portia White Protege Award.

She has completed solo exhibitions at Esker Foundation, Calgary, ABThe Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, ON; and Mönchehaus Museum, Goslar, DE. Her work has also been exhibited internationally, including Toronto Biennial, Toronto, ON; Sharjah Biennial 15, Sharjah, UAE; New Museum, New York, NY; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; The Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, TX; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Kunstraum Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany; Fondazione Imago Mundi, Treviso, Italy; Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto, ON; Albertz Benda, New York, NY; Charles Moffett Gallery, New York, NY; and T293 gallery, Rome, IT, among others. 

Amiri’s work is held in permanent collections, including the RBC Corporate Collection, Toronto, CA; the Denver Art Museum, CO; and Nova Scotia Art Bank, Halifax, CA. She lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.