Hangama Amiri’s Artwork ‘When I Am With You (2021)’ Exhibits in Group Exhibition Curated by Muheb Esmat at Smack Mellon, New York
"Always In My Heart is an exhibition of works by Morehshin Allahyari, Hangama Amiri, and Fatemeh Kazemi, that explores the artists’ shared inquiry into popular visual and textual idioms of love, desire, and intimacy in each of their respective identity positions. [...]
Hangama Amiri’s When I Am With You (2021) is an intricately sewn textile that combines a Farsi poem of love and endearment with a weeping eye, red lips, and three postcards of Bollywood film stars at the corners. Amiri’s work reproduces common tropes of romance and intimacy, reminiscent of the diaries of high school lovers. Here, poetic symbolism and Bollywood stars serve as a vehicle for smuggling in expressions of love and desire, subtly subverting the social and cultural norms that restrict this gendered language from a female-centric perspective in Afghanistan. The prevalence of these foreign stars is both an ode to the enormous presence Bollywood films have in the country and a reflection of lingering social anxieties that prevent the creation of a nuanced and inclusive language of romance."
The exhibition runs from 18 November 2022 to 8 January 2023 at Smack Mellon Gallery in Brooklyn, New York
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