When her diplomat father moved his family first to Nice and then Paris, the little Ghada Amer was only 11 years old. She would only return to her home country a decade later. President Anouar el-Sadate had been assassinated by Islamic militants, and she noticed that Western fashion had been adapted to suit local restrictions. Venus magazine, aimed at veiled women, was a medium specifically designed to showcase this particular fashion. Inside its pages, advertisements from the biggest fashion houses were routinely retouched. The young artist was intrigued by this manipulation. Coming from painting, influenced by, namely, abstract expressionism, she decided to turn to a distinctly "feminine" art by substituting pigments for threads. She takes up embroidery, basing her work on the images of female figures found in magazines, and in that way examining the construction, point by point, of the place occupied by women, sexuality, and love in contemporary society. During her first period (1991-1992), she used figurative embroidery to represent the domestic environment (Five Women at Work). To sever the link between herself and her subjects, she then decided to use pornographic images. The needle eroticises the canvas. The embroidery is deliberately lazy, threads are tangled or dangle from the frame: they provoke a pictorial effect resembling that of a dripping Pollock. She also embroiders texts related to Arabic romantic culture: all of the passages in the Koran that deal with women, in Private Rooms (1998), or a medieval Arabic treatise on the topic of pleasure called Encyclopedia of Pleasure. Since the 1990s, she has also created gardens: The Space for Pulling Off Daisy Petals (1997), at the Crestet Centre d’Art in Vaison-la-Romaine, and Peace Garden (2002), at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden.
Lamia BALAFREJ
See this illustrated text on the website of the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions
