The Other Home
Hangama Amiri participates at the Toronto Biennal of Art 2024 with the project 'The Other Home'.
'The Other Home' (2024) is a large-scale textile installation that examines ideas of exile and migration. The artwork, composed of various vertical panels, addresses a range of emotions associated with homelessness and the process of developing new social ties and forms of belonging. By using fabric from different parts of the Middle East and South and Central Asia, she recomposes her own affective landscape and reflects the collective struggle to find a sense of home in ourselves and in the world.
The Toronto Biennial of Art’s mission is to make contemporary art accessible to everyone. A ten-week event every two years, the Biennial commissions artists to create new works for a city-wide exhibition in dialogue with Toronto’s diverse local contexts.
For the occasion Hangama explains her project: ‘I chose the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto for my installation, The Other Home, with the intention to elevate the ideas of community, connectivity, and a shared experience of the diaspora communities in Toronto and Canada. The mural sized fabric installation, consists of six large-scale textile panels with each panel engages visual narrative, figuration, and soft objects that represent the idea of home to me. The soft panels are supported and connected together by a rope hung from the ceiling; they are to create a sensory experience for the viewers with reflection on mobility and the state of in-betweenness in a globalized age. The emphasis on having works installed in a linear motion derives from my interest in storytelling, especially oral history that defines our core understanding of what home can be. I source fabrics from different parts of the Middle East, South Asia and Central Asia. Individually, they are cultural and historic signifiers for many Afghan people’s memories of home. One central underlying theme for Toronto Biennial is the attempt of world-making. I would like to honor the creative potential of how a sense of home could be born in this world-making process, individually by a diasporic member and collectively by communities'.
'The Other Home' (2024) is a large-scale textile installation that examines ideas of exile and migration. The artwork, composed of various vertical panels, addresses a range of emotions associated with homelessness and the process of developing new social ties and forms of belonging. By using fabric from different parts of the Middle East and South and Central Asia, she recomposes her own affective landscape and reflects the collective struggle to find a sense of home in ourselves and in the world.
The Toronto Biennial of Art’s mission is to make contemporary art accessible to everyone. A ten-week event every two years, the Biennial commissions artists to create new works for a city-wide exhibition in dialogue with Toronto’s diverse local contexts.
For the occasion Hangama explains her project: ‘I chose the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto for my installation, The Other Home, with the intention to elevate the ideas of community, connectivity, and a shared experience of the diaspora communities in Toronto and Canada. The mural sized fabric installation, consists of six large-scale textile panels with each panel engages visual narrative, figuration, and soft objects that represent the idea of home to me. The soft panels are supported and connected together by a rope hung from the ceiling; they are to create a sensory experience for the viewers with reflection on mobility and the state of in-betweenness in a globalized age. The emphasis on having works installed in a linear motion derives from my interest in storytelling, especially oral history that defines our core understanding of what home can be. I source fabrics from different parts of the Middle East, South Asia and Central Asia. Individually, they are cultural and historic signifiers for many Afghan people’s memories of home. One central underlying theme for Toronto Biennial is the attempt of world-making. I would like to honor the creative potential of how a sense of home could be born in this world-making process, individually by a diasporic member and collectively by communities'.