Winter 2025 Exhibitions Launch at Esker Foundation

Esker Foundation launches the winter season with a trio of solo exhibitions by Hangama Amiri, Erika DeFreitas, and Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi.

Opening Reception:
Friday, January 24, 2025, 6 – 9 pm. All welcome.

Artist Talk and Tour with Hangama Amiri:
Saturday, January 25, 2025, 1 – 2pm.

Hangama Amiri, Man with Vase of Tulips, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and T293, Rome.

Hangama Amiri
PARTING/فراق

January 25 – April 27, 2025

Hangama Amiri creates intricately layered textile compositions that muse on home, kinship, and memory. PARTING/فراق builds on an ongoing body of work that focuses on the artist’s personal history and diasporic experience.

Following the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Amiri and her family fled their home in Kabul in 1996, which necessitated a period of familial separation. Her father worked in Denmark and later Norway, while Amiri lived in Dushanbe, Tajikistan with her mother and three siblings, before the family settled together in Halifax in 2005. This nine-year separation was marked by the frequent exchange of letters, snapshots, and gifts; messages that outlined the contours of her family’s lives and offered glimpses into jobs, celebrations, or daily acts of care.

In the present, Amiri mines this archive of family photos, material fragments, and memories, translating them into lushly detailed textile collages that focus on her parents. For instance, Woman Before a Mirror recalls a photograph of Amiri’s mother standing in a favourite outfit in the primary bedroom of their Dushanbe apartment. The details are intensely specific to this period of her life: the bedroom’s wallpaper and furnishings evoke the prevalence of Soviet-era interior design and architecture in Tajikistan, a former Soviet Republic. Elsewhere, Man With Vase of Tulips is an imag-ined portrait of Amiri’s father in an apartment in Norway, where he worked for a tulip producer. His tender embrace of the flowers in their vase speaks to their symbolic import as a source of income for the family, and situates them as a proxy for his labour and care.

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Erika DeFreitas, The Black Madonnas of Perpetual Murmurs 1, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Christie Contemporary, Toronto.

Erika DeFreitas
and that break is the one that shows (to shift, a curve, to quiver)

January 25 – April 27, 2025

In 2011, a team of researchers examined the teeth of a woman who lived in medieval Germany sometime during the years of 1000-1200 AD. The researchers found hundreds of tiny blue particles within her dental calculus, which they determined to be lapis lazuli, a metamorphic rock prized for its intense blue colour often used to tint medieval illuminated manuscripts. The researchers deduced that this woman must have been a scribe who repeatedly licked her pigment-soaked pen nib as she worked on illuminated manuscripts, an area of work previously thought to be dominated exclusively by men.¹

This exchange of artist and material, body and mineral, sparked a realm of inquiry and exploration for artist Erika DeFreitas to search for absences within the canon of art history. The new and recent works in this solo exhibition commune with a constellation of women in a multi-part dialogue that transcends space and time.

These women range from the medieval scribe with lapis lazuli embedded in her teeth, to the subject of an 1870 painting by French artist Frédéric Bazille, to the artist’s paternal grandmother, who was one of a community of women who tended to a statue of the Black Madonna of La Divina Pastora Church in Siparia, Trinidad.

Spanning collage, video, performance, and photography, DeFreitas’ work excavates presence within absence, and manifests kinship and memory within gesture and process.

[1] Brigit Katz, “Blue Pigment in Medieval Woman’s Teeth Suggest She Was a Highly Skilled Artist.” Smithsonian Mag, January 10, 2019.

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Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Into The Violet Belly, 2022. Film still. Courtesy of the artist.

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
The blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it

January 25 – April 27, 2025

Interweaving family lore, mythology, science fiction, and digital abstraction, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi’s 2022 film Into The Violet Belly follows the collaboration between the artist and her mother, Thuyen Hoa, who fled Vietnam after the end of the American War via a near-calamitous sea journey. Oscillating between voices, visual registers, and timescales—was it seven months or seven thousand years? — Into The Violet Belly offers up an image of its multiplicitous structure: a massive digital swarm, tiny avatars of migrating bodies, swimming in an infinite blue.

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Continuing in the Project Space until February 2 is Taiessa: variegata. Upcoming in the Project Space is the exhibition by Megan Feniak: With All Our Vernal Suns launching on February 10.

Explore and participate in Esker’s free public programming, discover the upcoming programs at: www.eskerfoundation.com/program/

About Esker Foundation

Founded in May 2012, Esker Foundation owes its vision to its founders, Calgary-based collectors and philanthropists, Jim and Susan Hill, who wanted to create an accessible and welcoming space for people to experience contemporary art exhibitions and programming. An important part of this vision is to ensure that barriers to access are as low as possible. To that end, Esker is proud to offer free admission and free programs.

Through exhibitions, public programs, publishing, and commissioning activities, the Foundation supports artists and audiences through a variety of learning, connecting, and collaborative models. The gallery reflects on current developments in local, regional, and international culture; creates opportunities for public dialogue; and supports the production of groundbreaking new work, ideas, and research.

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday to Friday: 11am-6pm
Saturday & Sunday: 12-5pm

Accessibility: the gallery is barrier-free.
Admission and Programs are free.

Press Contact:
Jill Henderson, Head of Communications & Marketing
Tel: 403 930 2499
jhenderson@eskerfoundation.com

Press kit & image download.

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