INFO

Stitches of Care presents an early photograph of Narges Mohammadi, taken when she was three years old in Afghanistan. In the staged portrait, she wears a handmade dress embroidered and sewn by her mother. The image captures a deliberate act: to pause time, to preserve joy, and to assert care even as war and political upheaval raged outside the frame. While the photograph depicts a happy child in a lovingly made garment, it was taken during the Afghan civil war, a period marked by the fall of the Soviet-backed government and the rise of the Taliban. The tension between the innocence of the portrait and the violence beyond it makes the image deeply ambivalent.

Mohammadi revisited this photograph years later, during high school, when she began experimenting with colourful optical-illusion patterns surrounding the original image. These additions marked her first explorations into imagining places beyond reality: worlds of dimension, depth, and colour that offered a counterpoint to the grey weight of lived experience.

The work acknowledges both the suffering and fragmentation of her childhood and the resilience embodied in her mother’s stitches. The garment becomes more than clothing: it is a testimony to care and the will to create beauty in the face of war. At the same time, the colored patterns reflect Mohammadi’s own developing artistic voice, pointing toward her lifelong search for spaces where creativity and imagination endure. Stitches of Care lays the foundation for the journey that Mohammadi’s life and practice would take, weaving personal memory into a broader narrative of resilience and hope.