Collection: Amiri, Hangama

Hangama Amiri received her BFA in Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2012. She was a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale University School of Art and Sciences in New Haven, CT (2015-2016).

Hangama has exhibited her paintings nationally and internationally, recently in New York City, Toronto, France, Italy and London (UK). Her recent collaborative video project, "My Motherland" (2015) was premiered at Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.

Amiri won the 2011 Lieutenant Governor's Community Voluntarism Award, the 2013 Portia White Protégé Award, and in 2015 her painting "Island of Dreams" won an honourable mention at the RBC Canadian Painting Competition.

Artist Statement

As an Afghan-Canadian artist, I’m interested in painting childhood memories, cross-cultural dialogues and Afghan feminism. I paint in the styles of representational realism and abstract realism, using large-scale, two-dimensional surfaces, integrating mixed-media: oil, acrylic, ink, screen-printing and earth on canvas.

In my current practice, I’ve been drawn into painting the vast landscape of Nova Scotia. My artwork in recent years has been based on my exploration of the spatial experiences of the South Shore, Prince Edward Island, Wolfville, and Halifax. The painting series embraces the local landscape and draws association with the community, specifically by focusing on history, social interaction and architectural space. Each painting uses a pastiche of styles and abstraction; flat planes of colour, geometric shapes, expressive mark making, distorted perspectives and monumental scale on canvas.