"For her first solo exhibition at Union Pacific gallery, Afghan-Canadian artist Hangama Amiri has employed an architectural splitscreen to take us inside the story of a separation. Combining the visual vocabulary of history painting with the skills and materials of a couturier Amiri explores, through fabric appliqué, the photographs her parents exchanged during their nine year separation following the family’s exodus from Afghanistan: her father’s dispatches from Norway and Denmark on the top floor of the gallery, her mother’s from Tajikistan on the lower level. Amiri turned to the family archive to process her grief for the countless Afghan families splintered, as hers was, in the recent round of geopolitical roulette that returned the Taliban to power. Yet she is not creating cathartic fabric pastiches of her parents' photographs. She is reminiscing on her childhood - fusing archive with memory by examining the dialogue between her parents’ pictorial communications, refracting details through her own nostalgia, and splicing new images amongst her parents’ visuals. While deeply personal, Amiri’s kaleidoscopic tableaus are also fascinating period pieces speckled with details that capture the extraordinary culture that emerged at the confluence of Afghan and Tajik communities in the late 1990s. With a panoply of fabrics and an unexpected, disquietly seductive, immersive environment, she has memorialized how families like hers celebrated, what entertained them, what their homes looked like, and perhaps most significantly, how they wanted to remember themselves. In doing so, Amiri has added depth, nuance and complications to our understanding of contemporary Afghan diaspora, commemorated the resilience and love of an Afghan marriage, and composed a bittersweet ballad of hope for a new generation of separated lovers." Written by Sarah Burney