Ghada Amer (Arabic: غادة عامر; May 22, 1963, in Cairo, Egypt[1]) is a contemporary artist, much of her work deals with issues of gender and sexuality.
Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt she has lived in France for twenty years, and doesn't consider herself singularly Egyptian, African or French.
“She had successfully invented a language for women using knitting, and I liked her use of commercial and political symbols, as well.”[9] Amer's multiple geographic relocations are reflected in her work.
Together friends Amer and Reza Farkhondeh collaborated on art drawings and prints, under the name "RFGA" starting in the early 2000s.
[11][10] Amer would create visual explorations of female sexuality, and Farkhondeh would add imagery of forms and the beauty of nature.
Therefore, talking about love in my art implied a very sexual aspect.”[18] In 2000, she continued her work extracting images of women from magazines such as Hustler and Club.
In works such as Coleurs Noires and The Slightly Smaller Colored Square Painting she traced and stitched serially masturbating or bound figures and partially covered the erotic images behind tangled threads and gel medium.
For example, in 2001, Ghada Amer created Encyclopedia of Pleasure, a sculptural installation that features fifty-four boxes, covered in canvas, and embroidered with texts about women beauty and sexuality.
[20] It is perhaps appropriate, given that Amer is still at an early stage of exploring the possibilities of her new sculptural language, that 100 Words of Love, Baiser #1 and Baiser #2, and Blue Bra Girls propose different ways in which the manipulation of line, shape, and color can yield an infinite range of compositional and design effects, even within the limitation of globular form.
The facture and medium of her new sculpture demands a different perspective on this subject, precisely because the casting technique it requires is a traditionally male craft.
[20] To be sure, her use of resin, stainless steel, and bronze casting to make these sculptures does not suggest the kind of dramatic intervention in the gendering of the arts that her abstract expressionist gestures did in her canvases a decade ago.
Words like “docile,” “sweet,” “long-lashed,” and “virgin” were a few of the most common adjectives used to describe “women’s qualities.”[12] Following the events of September 11, 2001, Amer's work began to explore the charged topic of Islamic terrorism.
[19] Amer's adoption of naked or semi-naked female figures as a recurring pictorial element in her work assumes an ideological and political dimension that is anything but discreet or ambiguous.
Despite the differences between her Islamic upbringing and Western models of behavior, Amer's work addresses universal problems, such as the oppression of women, which are prevalent in many cultures.
Amer's work follows a long modernist tradition of critical practices against veiling, which, as Qassem Amin, Huda Sha'rawi, and Duriyah Shafiq argued decades before, represents a most visible symbol of the forces arrayed against women's emancipation.
[21] By encouraging women to use their bodies as vehicles of pleasure and instruments of power, Amer allies herself with a brand of gender politics whose very name remains hotly contested.
Hoping to move past the aesthetic tradition (first identified by Laura Mulvey) in which men are the bearers of the erotic gaze and women merely its object, critics have sought to reintegrate sexuality into the female subject.
"[14] The submission of women to the tyranny of domestic life, the celebration of female sexuality and pleasure, the incomprehensibility of love, the foolishness of war and violence, and an overall quest for formal beauty, constitute the territory that she explores and expresses in her art.
A detail of her work, Knotty but Nice, was used on the cover of the September 2006 issue of ARTnews magazine, as part of a focus on erotic art.
Amer exhibited Rainbow Girls at Cheim & Read, New York in 2014[28] This multi-layered body of work included ornate metal sculptures as well as embroidery on canvas.
This body of work drew on calligraphy from Arabic writing to 'modern' typeface woven to create tapestries of 'Rainbow girls' for whom the exhibition is named.
[34] Also in 2021, Women's Qualities, a bio art / landscape / ' sculpture park' exhibition was viewed by members of the public at the Sunnylands Center and Gardens in California's Coachella valley.
In 2014 and 2015, her work was included in the traveling exhibition "The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists" curated by Simon Njami.