Henna Night/Shabe Kheena II
March 27 – May 2, 2025
The latest installment of Amiri’s ongoing project, Henna Night/Shabe Kheena, consists of 8 textile wall
hangings that depict an Afghan henna night celebration, a pre-wedding ceremony where the bride’s female
family and friends gather to adorn her hands with henna and offer their support as she prepares for the
transition from her family home to her new life. Through the artist’s diasporic and emphatically feminine lens,
the scene of this traditional rite of passage becomes a venue for exploring the role of cultural rituals in
forging a sense of community, building resilience, and shaping our notions of home, identity, and belonging.
The ceremonious transition that Amiri tenderly portrays in Henna Night II stands in stark contrast to her own
experience of periodic displacement. In 1996, when the artist was six years old, the Taliban seized power in
Afghanistan, and she and her family were forced to flee their homeland. They subsequently lived in Pakistan,
Iran, and Tajikistan as refugees before settling in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2005. Having spent much of her
early childhood in her uncle’s fabric shop in Kabul and learned to sew from her mother at a young age, Amiri
relied on sewing throughout her youth to forge a sense of control, continuity, and connection to home. She
views fabrics as artifacts that carry memory and hold the cocooning warmth of home. Her artistic practice
can be characterized as a meditative ritual of stitching together scraps of memory to reconcile fragmented
experiences into cohesive narratives. In this series, she incorporates fabrics collected from her various
homes and blends her inherited textile skillset with the language of still-life painting and portraiture to create
an homage to familial and communal bonds that anchor us during times of change and uncertainty.
In her depiction of a cultural celebration held by women at home, Amiri reflects on Afghan women’s
dichotomous relationship to domestic spaces, which are simultaneously sites of confinement and the only
place where they can exercise their agency and express themselves freely. Since the return of the Taliban to
power in 2021, Afghan girls and women— the descendants of foremothers who received the right to
participate in political elections well before their Western counterparts— have been gradually stripped of their
rights to education, employment, mobility, self-expression, or any manner of participation in public life. Amiri
has incorporated drawn curtains in every room depicted in this body of work to highlight the alienation of
women from the flow of life outside the window. In this context celebratory bustle and anticipation
conveyed in Henna Night II represents the creative ways in which women resist disenfranchisement by
creating community around their customs and define their purpose in supporting each other at home. Amiri
also foregrounds the small, private acts of rebellion, such as painting their nails, wearing jewelry, or dressing
in bright colours, through which women defy societal expectations under the Taliban’s homogenizing rule
and assert their individuality.
In this series, Amiri also subtly touches on the experience of displacement and separation from loved ones
as a fact of life for many Afghans inside and outside the country. For example, the ceremonious display of
the groom’s picture in Photo of a Groom (2022) suggests the possibility that this may be a long-distance
wedding, which has become somewhat of a familiar convention. The sprinkling of the walls with postcards
and pictures of absent loved ones in Her Dressing Table (2022) also points to this trend of separation.
Additionally, the absence of any geographical or temporal markers in the images gives the work a sense of
purgatorial placelessness; the space portrayed in Amiri’s tableaux could be anywhere in the world. In this
vaguely precarious setting, the scene of celebration and domestic joy reflects the ingenuity and resilience of
women who somehow manage to “make home” despite the volatility external circumstances.
Amiri’s tapestries embody the complexity of her subjects. The fragmented aesthetic and raw edges of the
pieces are suggestive of the artist’s struggle to come to terms with her own lived experience of displacement
and embrace the hybridity of her own identity. At the same time, the unabashed tactility, colourfulness, and
joyful dynamism of her richly layered pieces reflect the imagination, resourcefulness, and defiance of people
who find ways to cope with upheaval and create spaces where they can live on their own terms.
Ultimately, Amiri’s painstaking process can be viewed as an exercise in generating belonging—a vital creative
practice that she has inherited from the women in her life.
Curated by Maryam Babaei
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