Stitching Memory: Fabric Appliqué Workshop with Hangama Amiri

A program of:
Hangama Amiri: PARTING/فراق

Saturday, March 7, 2026

Exhibition Tour: Artist Hangama Amiri and Curator Elizabeth Diggon in Conversation
1pm–2pm
Drop-ins welcome. No registration required. 

Stitching Memory: Fabric Appliqué Workshop with Hangama Amiri
2pm–4pm
Registration is required. Please register on Eventbrite.

Location: 
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
7 Hart House Circle

Join us for an afternoon exploring the themes, materials, and processes in the exhibition Hangama Amiri: PARTING/فراق. through an artist-led tour and workshop!

From 1pm–2pm, artist Hangama Amiri and curator Elizabeth Diggon will lead a guided tour of the exhibition. Come hear how Amiri translates her personal history and diasporic experience into lushly detailed textile collages that focus on her parents, constituting the ongoing body of work presented in PARTING/فراق. These textiles, through their uniquely close relationship to home and the body, become perfumed with meaning and memory over time. 

Following the exhibition tour, join Amiri for Stitching Memory: A Fabric Appliqué Workshop. The two-hour session invites participants to reflect and share their ideas of home, personal events, or special memories—of a place, a person, a dish, a scent, or an object. Together, we will transform the ideas into drawings and further into a textile piece of your own. 

Participants are encouraged to bring an item related to their home: it can be an object, a photograph, a text, or a piece of memorabilia. To begin, participants will be provided with heavy papers to glue down their fabric patches from their items in whichever sizes and forms. The artist will then perform and instruct participants in fabric appliqué, a quilting technique in which they will use scissors to cut out shapes from fabrics and later patch them together by gluing them onto heavy paper. We will experiment with different collages in materials, colours, textures, surfaces, and compositions with fabrics. 

Through layers of artistic transformation, the result will hopefully bring a new translation to the original item, a new idea to home and memory through the participants’ own creation. 

Registration is required for the workshop. No registration is necessary for the exhibition tour. Materials will be provided.

—

About the Artist and Curator

Hangama Amiri holds an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, where she graduated in 2020 from the Painting and Printmaking Department. She received her BFA from NSCAD University, Halifax, and is a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale University School of Art and Sciences. Her recent exhibitions include Parting (2025) at Esker Foundation, Calgary; Reminiscences II (2024) at T293 Gallery, Rome, Circle of Friends (2024) at Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto; Quiet Resistance (2023) at Moenchehaus Museum Goslar; Rumi (2023) at Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; A Homage to Home (2023) at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield; Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present (2023), and Toronto Biennial: Precarious Joy (2024).  

Amiri works predominantly in textiles to examine notions of home, as well as how gender, social norms, and larger geopolitical conflict impact the daily lives of women, both in Afghanistan and in the diaspora. Using textiles as her primary medium, Amiri searches to define, explore, and question these spaces. The figurative tendency in her work is due to her interest in the power of representation, especially those objects that are ordinary to our everyday life, such as a passport, a vase, or celebrity postcards. 

Elizabeth Diggon is a curator at Esker Foundation, Calgary, where her recent curatorial projects have included Lucia Hierro: Corotos y Ajuares, Leonard Suryajaya: Parting Gift for Quarantine Blues, and Farah Al Qasimi: Letters for Occasions. Recent publications include essays in Veronika Pausova: Fast Moving Sun and Rebellious: Alberta Women Artists in the 1980s. Additionally, her writing has been published in the Journal of Curatorial Studies, the Journal of Canadian Studies, as well as in exhibition texts for galleries across Canada. Diggon holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies and an M.A. in Art History from Queen’s University, Kingston.