TORONTO.- The Art Museum at the University of Toronto is presenting two compelling exhibitions that consider home, memory, land, and place from the perspectives of artists living in diaspora. Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt.: Terrestrial and Aquatic Contemplations of the Caribbean (February 25–August 1, 2026) brings together artists of Caribbean descent whose work explores the complexity of the region’s histories of colonialism, African diaspora, Indigeneity, and ongoing struggles for sovereignty and environmental justice.
This touring exhibition is curated by Michelle Jacques and Sally Frater of Remai Modern.
ﺮﻓHangama Amiri: PARTING/اق (February 25–April 11, 2026), the Afghan-Canadian artist’s first major solo exhibition in Toronto, draws on personal archives and familial memories to reflect on home, family, and migration. This touring exhibition is curated by Elizabeth Diggon, Curator at the Esker Foundation.
“It is our greatest pleasure to be able to present two new exhibitions that each uniquely explores histories of migration, the personal and political complexities of diasporic conditions, and the economic and cultural entanglements of places that are far apart and widely divergent,” says Barbara Fischer, Executive Director / Chief Curator at the Art Museum. “At a time when the experiences of rupture on account of war, persecution, economic displacement, and climate change shape the everyday lives of ever more of us, these exhibitions offer hope through vital sharing of personal memories, capacities of adaptation, and recollection of the ways in which our stories are knotted into each other and bound together beyond personal memory—across islands, lands, oceans and the depths of time.”
While we speak of “the Caribbean” as a single region, it is, in fact, a complex and varied place, defined by intricate histories, cultures, and geographies. Many know the region only through tourism—a view that offers superficial understanding. Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt. aims to create a space of reflection through the works of eleven artists who think deeply about the Caribbean and have familial and lived ties to the region. Video, photographic, and installation-based works by Alexandre Arrechea, Charles Campbell, Carolina Caycedo, Giana De Dier, Braxton Garneau, Deborah Jack, Las Nietas de Nonó, Hew Locke, Farihah Aliyah Shah, and Kara Springer speak to an intimate engagement with the land, sharing a way of knowing it through physical experience and embodied knowledge. Together, their works attest to the ways in which Caribbean communities resist, adapt, and create—sustaining powerful
traditions of solidarity, cultural expression, and environmental care in the wake of the pressures of colonial legacies, social and economic inequity, and climate change.
Hangama Amiri creates intricately layered textile compositions that explore kinship, memory, and the meaning of home.
ﺮﻓIn PARTING/اق, she builds on an ongoing body of work rooted in her personal history and diasporic experience during the nine- year period of familial separation that followed her family’s migration from Kabul in 1996, when the artist was seven years old. Her father sought asylum 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 separation was marked by the frequent exchange of letters, snapshots, and gifts, offering glimpses into jobs, celebrations, and daily acts of care in the family’s lives.
Amiri mines this archive of family photographs, letters, material fragments, and memories, translating them into dense and lush collages that focus on her parents. Her large-scale, intricate, and labour-intensive textile compositions combine painting, printmaking, quilting, and appliqué techniques. The resulting works honour the immense labour of caring for family amidst migration and separation.
