Ghada Amer

(Egypt, 22/05/1963 - )

Colour Misbehavior (2009)

Born in Cairo in 1963, Amer and her family relocated to France when she was 11 years old. Despite enduring stereotypes of practicing Muslims, Amer’s parents were modern and progressive, encouraging her and her three sisters to pursue higher education and professional careers in addition to traditional domestic roles. Initially studying mathematics, Amer quickly realised that the only path for her future was an artistic one, and so, in 1984, she enrolled in the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Nice (or the National School of Fine Arts), located in Nice.

Here, Amer became acutely aware of the fact that art history, and especially that of abstraction, was a history written by, for and about men. Not only were women absent from her history books and her classes, Amer recalls that female students were actively discouraged from studying in art schools and pursuing artistic careers, with her male teachers refusing to teach female students and incessantly reminding her that “painting was dead” and that “there was no future for women in painting”. This only strengthened her commitment to forging her own artistic language to speak about women, from the perspective of a woman.

A multidisciplinary artist, Amer’s work spans painting, ceramic and metal sculpture, embroidery and landscape design and rejects early 1970s, feminist notions of the female body, particularly that women’s bodies must be dispelled from artistic practice to prevent further objectification and essentialising, instead, Amer juxtaposes explicit sexual acts with the delicacy of needle and thread, giving a tenderness that is otherwise ignored by simple objectification. Expressing herself using a formal language that has been traditionally associated with ‘women’s work’ while at the same time penetrating the male space of the painted canvas that has been ostensibly forbidden to her.

Early in her career she primarily embroidered women engaged in domestic activities with her artwork Cinq Femmes au Travail (Five Women at Work) (1991) acting as a representation of her own alienation. One woman is shown performing domestic labour on each of the four canvases, one is cooking, one is mothering, one is vacuuming and one is grocery shopping, the fifth woman exists in the title but is invisible in the canvases – this is Amer. Much like the labour performed by the women depicted, the artist is too crucial but unseen.

Soon, however, she realised that instead of disrupting the representation of women, she had merely aligned with Western ideals of femininity and canonical narratives of art history wherein women are spoke of and for, but very rarely allowed to speak for themselves and which train women in passive behaviour. Seeking to subvert this ideal and the male gaze using images of the nude bodies of women in pornographic magazines and began exploring porn as another cross-cultural form of ‘women’s work’. By depicting these women as being familiar with their bodies, instead of bored, passive objects, Amer shows them to be taking control of their own desires and producing their own pleasure while creating tension and uneasiness between male fantasies of the domestic and the erotic.

Layering acrylic paint, embroidery and gel, her figures are both present on the canvas yet obscured by thread, reflecting her earlier challenge of feminine visibility and invisibility in painting and abstraction which had, by the late twentieth century, become a major expression of masculinity. Deliberately quoting Jackson Pollock’s drip techniques with her embroidered threads, Amer places herself in the direct historical lineage of abstraction and abstract expressionism but maintains alignment with her feminist contemporaries in their critique of the gendered sexual implications of his work’s “masculine energy and power”. Like so many artists who happen to be women, she struggled between her frustration with the exclusion enforced by canonical art history and her veneration of the ‘genius’ artists it venerates.

Exploring the dichotomies of an uneasy world and confronting the language of hostility and finality, Amer created her embroidered sculpture Borqa’ (1997), a half-Naqqab with a lace mouthpiece, which was commissioned by the National Center for Visual Arts in promotion of the Bayeux tapestry and its historic techniques of French lace production. Worn by women in a number of Muslim societies either by choice or compulsion, Amer embroidered an abbreviated definition of the word “fear” in Arabic onto the mouthpiece which reads:

خاف، فزع   Fear, Terror

اتقى، ضد آمن Dread is the opposite of being safe

فيقال خافه و خاف منه  One thus says fear him, to be afraid of him

و خاف عليه   To worry about him

Created at a time of mounting social and religious conservatism in Muslim-majority societies, including her home country of Egypt and when Islamic dress began to be viewed with suspicion and anxiety in Muslin-minority societies, including adopted country of France, Amer chose to highlight her own anxiety at being one day forced to wear such a veil. Embroidered with lace and jade pearls, Borqa’ alludes to the presence of a voice that the veil has forcefully silenced. In 2007, the artist states ‘I made Borqa’ in 1997 for myself. It is my own borqa’ in case I was forced to wear it’.

Amer takes traditional notions of gender and cultural identity, abstraction, and religious fundamentalism and turns them on their heads. Through her public garden projects, she invites the audience to not merely view her work or walk through a space, but to inhabit it. These liminal spaces are simultaneously art that is functional as well as art for art’s sake.

First installed in 2000 in Korea’s Metropolitan Museum, Amer began her Women’s Qualities garden by asking men and women from the museum’s staff and visiting artists what traits they attributed to women. Taking the eight most common responses, Virtuous, Chaste, Submissive, Fair Skin, Large Breasts, Rich, Diligent, Sensual, Amer turned them into floral inscriptions on seven flower beds using a native flower that blooms only once a year for two months.

Returning to this concept for Frieze Sculpture in 2020, Amer interviewed passersby in New York and planted twelve garden beds with the phrases she repeatedly received, which included Hard Working, Good Cook, Strong, Resilient, Beautiful, Sexy, Happy, Nurturing, Smart, Patient, Kind, Independent, Elegant.

The following year, she planted another seven flowerbeds at the Desert X exhibition in California’s Coachella Valley with the responses including, Beautiful, Loving, Nurturing, Resilient, Strong, Caring, Determined.

Like her use of pornographic images, Amer uses the ubiquity of enforced female stereotypes to address the cross-cultural subjugation of women and highlights the social expectations that women must be both ‘Virtuous’ and ‘Chaste’ while also being ‘Sensual’ and have ‘Large Breasts’, demanding that they be wives and mothers outside the home and in the kitchen but sex objects in the bedroom. They must be ‘Independent’ and ‘Hard Working’ while also being a ‘Good Cook’ and remaining ‘Nurturing’, so that they can still care for a husband and children before themselves.

Amer says that her work addresses “first and foremost the ambiguous, transitory nature of the paradox that arises when searching for concrete definitions of east and west, feminine and masculine, art and craft”.

Amer represented Egypt at the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale in South Africa in 1997, the Kwanju Biennial in South Korea in 2000, and the 51st exhibition of the renowned Venice Biennale in 2005. Throughout her career, Amer’s work has been in group exhibitions at the Musée des Beaux-Arts and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Serpentine Gallery in London, MoMA PS1 and the Whitney Museum both in New York, the Museum Kunst Palast in Germany and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Additionally, she has been the subject of many solo exhibitions including at the Gagosian Gallery in London, New York and Los Angeles, the Institut Valencìa d’Art Modern in Spain, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Dirimart gallery in Istanbul and the Museo de Arte in Zapopan, among many, many more.

Image: Ghada Amer, Colour Misbehavior (2009). Embroidery and gel on canvas, 177.8 x 149.9 cm. Private collection.