<div><p>A major survey of the French-Egyptian artist’s work in Marseille showcases the breadth of her politically charged practice</p></div><p><strong></strong></p>

Wendy Vogel

Ghada Amer: Fighting for equal rights one stich at a time

<p>‘A Woman’s Voice Is Revolution.’ So proclaims Ghada Amer’s latest garden work, installed in September outside the Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean (Mucem). The museum is one of three institutions in Marseille that will host Amer’s first retrospective in France this winter. Blooming at the threshold of this major survey – which runs from December 2, 2022 to April 16, 2023 – Amer’s boldly titled installation distills many of her longstanding concerns: ‘women’s work’, gender parity, wordplay, and the relationship between East and West.&nbsp;</p><p>It is also the French-Egyptian artist’s first garden installation using Arabic characters. The piece features the titular phrase in large, hollow, Cor-Ten steel letters. Coal fills the interiors of the shapes – an allusion to the dark history of witch-burning. Surrounding the steel letters, Amer has planted neat rows of helichrysum (French Immortelle), a resilient local perennial plant that will burst with yellow flowers in the spring. Like all of Amer’s language-based work, <em>A Woman’s Voice Is Revolution </em>(2022) contains multiple levels of feminist resonance.</p>

<p>The political phrase, mobilized during the Arab Spring demonstrations of 2011, is a twist on the ancient Arabic proverb: ‘A woman’s voice is shameful.’ ‘The two sentences differ by only a single character,’ says Amer, when I meet her in her Harlem studio. I venture that the sentiment has additional resonance since the explosion of protests in Iran following Mahsa Amini’s death on September 16, 2022, after being detained by the morality police for not wearing a veil. Amer notes, however, that she first sketched <em>A Woman’s Voice Is Revolution</em> in 2019 – long before the latest Iranian demonstrations. Indeed, the artist’s work has an uncanny way of mirroring, if not anticipating, major political events concerning gender equality. Last spring, Amer opened the exhibition ‘My Body, My Choice’, with a corresponding garden piece, at Goodman Gallery’s London location. That same month, an anonymous source leaked the Supreme Court of the United States’s draft opinion on the case of<em> Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization</em> – the decision that overturned constitutional rights to abortion access.</p>

<p>Would he like to expand his business in Paris? It is already the case, he says, by way of off-site exhibitions, such as the Carla Accardi show organized at Le Corbusier’s jewel of a building, Maison La Roche, for the first edition of Paris + par Art Basel. He plans to pursue other exceptional projects like this ‘fine example of how art dialogues with architecture.’ This is without doubt one of his mantras – the white cube is not really for him. ‘Architecture is one of the key elements of our activity.’ </p><p>In each city where he has installed a gallery, De Carlo has selected sites charged with soul. Since 2019, his gallery in Milan has been located in the Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, an icon of 1930s architecture, replete with marble and woodwork. ‘We’ve had it with the cliché of the minimalist space, where the art is supposed to be the sole actor,’ he affirms. In London, he has just restored a Mayfair apartment whose walls he painted a luminous sea-green – the original color dating back to 1723, unearthed in poor condition. ‘Maybe it’s too green? In any case, we’re happy we did it! Our artists adore this kind of context, and that’s all that matters.’</p><hr /><p>Emmanuelle Lequeux is a journalist based in Paris.</p><p><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1104/Massimo-De-Carlo">Massimo De Carlo</a> will be part of the&nbsp;Galleries and Kabinett sectors in the upcoming edition of Art Basel Miami&nbsp;Beach,&nbsp;from December 1 – 3, 2022.</p><p>Caption for full-bleed images:&nbsp;Massimo De Carlo by Bettina Pittaluga for Paris+ par Art Basel, 2022.</p><p>English translation: Jacob Bromberg</p>

<p>Amer’s multifaceted practice is grounded in cross-cultural fluency, informed by her upbringing in Egypt and France. Born in Cairo in 1963, the artist moved with her family to Nice at age 11. She remained in France, where she received undergraduate and graduate degrees in art, before moving to New York City in 1996. Two events catalyzed her breakthrough as a young artist. The first was a rejection. As an art student at Villa Arson in Nice, Amer was denied access to the painting department because of her gender by a chauvinist professor. Since then, Amer has seen painting as a space to confront this patriarchal, art-historical lineage. The second event was a discovery. While in art school during the late 1980s, Amer visited her family, who had moved back to Egypt. There, she encountered <em style="background-color: initial;">Venus </em>magazine, which she has described as ‘<em style="background-color: initial;">Vogue</em> for the veiled woman.’ The spreads in <em style="background-color: initial;">Venus </em>used photomontage to amend Western trends to fit with religiously conservative standards, adding long sleeves, lowered hemlines, and veils for modesty over existing editorial images. It was shortly after finding <em style="background-color: initial;">Venus</em> that Amer started experimenting with pattern, collage, and embroidery in her work.</p>

<p>Amer’s retrospective in Marseille, curated by Mucem’s Hélia Paukner and art critic Philippe Dagen, spans three venues: Mucem, the Centre de la Vieille-Charité, and the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. The Mucem exhibition, ‘Orient – الغرب - الشرق – Occident’, includes some of Amer’s earliest works with pattern and embroidery, directly inspired by <em style="background-color: initial;">Venus </em>magazine, as well as the photographic series ‘I ♥ Paris’ (1991), never before seen in France. The photos show Amer, the Iranian artist Ladan S. Naderi, and a third woman dressed in full religious veils, posing in front of tourist attractions like the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. It addressed France's deep-seated rejection of the veil and governmental attempts to limit its usage&nbsp;–&nbsp;another example of imposing control over women's bodies.&nbsp;The show will also include installations such as <em style="background-color: initial;">Encyclopedia of Pleasure</em> (2001), for which Amer embroidered passages (translated into English) from a banned, tenth-century, erotic text by Ali Ibn Nasr Al Katib. She sees these pieces as ‘a protest against the loss of great freedom.’</p><p>The use of pornographic imagery has been a constant in Amer’s work since 1991. It often features women masturbating or in femme-femme couples. She traces these erotic images and anonymizes them – making the faces almost cartoonish – before drawing or stitching them onto canvas. Amer also often adds gel medium or acrylic to the loose strands of her stitching, creating abstract swirls evocative of the male-dominated language of Abstract Expressionism – in effect, simultaneously appropriating and repurposing two patriarchal visual traditions (of erotic and abstract art).</p>

<p>‘When I make my pornographic works, I specifically want to include white women because they are part of the canon of beauty,’ Amer says. Even if Western beauty standards have become more inclusive of BIPOC people, the artist argues that, in pornography, they are often pigeonholed into fetishistic subcategories. ‘My work is not about fetishization,’ she adds. Rather than an interest in the sex industry as a subject, Amer began sourcing this imagery for more personal reasons. ‘For me, it helped to overcome these taboos about sexuality that I had acquired from my own growing-up,’ she says. ‘It freed me, the more I looked and drew. It empowered me and I empowered them.’ She sees pornographic images, much like the cartoons of Disney princesses she adopts as comprising a narrow vocabulary – ‘an alphabet’ – of poses, gestures, and body types utilized in the creation of her works. One of Amer’s most ambitious works to date in this series, <em style="background-color: initial;">Les Grands Nympheas </em>(<em style="background-color: initial;">The Large Nympheas</em>) (2022), will be on view in Marseille. Measuring 275 x 366 cm, the canvas took four years to complete. Here, images of a single masturbating woman and a femme-femme couple are repeated across the canvas, nearly obscured by vibrant whorls of thread in rainbow colors. Though the title pays homage to Claude Monet’s <em style="background-color: initial;">Water Lilies </em>(1897–1919),the process is fully Amer’s own: the work of an artist at the height of her painterly prowess.</p>

<p>Rounding out Amer’s retrospective is the exhibition at Vieille-Charité: ‘Ghada Amer – Sculpteure.’ The title, once again, incorporates grammatical wordplay. Amer has spelled the French word <em style="background-color: initial;">sculpteur </em>(sculptor) with an extra ‘e’ to render it feminine – a word that doesn’t exist in French. (The word for a female sculptor is <em style="background-color: initial;">sculptrice</em>.) Amer began working in sculpture in 2010. Her first pieces were hands-off productions, executed by technicians from her drawings. She then began taking classes at Greenwich House Pottery, New York, in the mid-2010s, which led to further enthusiasm for ceramics and other materials. Unlike painting, which Amer studied for decades, sculpture presents a new, open field of possibility. She cites her favorite sculptors as expressionistic wielders of the medium: Auguste Rodin, whose textured, naturalistic works represented a freshly modern approach to sculpture; Alberto Giacometti, known for his attenuated, existential figures; and John Chamberlain, who created gnarled, monumental compositions from crushed car parts and other discarded objects.</p><p>Like these artists, Amer’s work bridges timelessness with a sense of pathos. Unlike most of the giants of art history, however, Amer is committed to understanding this moment from a gendered lens. Yet, her work is never preachy or sanctimonious, but instead characterized by a sense of irreverence, sensuality, and abandon – whatever the medium. These qualities carry her own revolutionary voice loud and clear.</p>

<p>Wendy Vogel is a writer and independent curator based in New York. She contributes regularly to <em>Artforum </em>and <em>Art in America</em>, among other publications. She is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in Short-Form Writing.</p><p>Ghada Amer is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1199/Marianne-Boesky-Gallery">Marianne Boesky Gallery</a> (New York),&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/12669/Tina-Kim-Gallery">Tina Kim Gallery</a> (New York),&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1173/Kewenig">Kewenig</a> (Berlin, Palma de Mallorca),&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1143/Goodman-Gallery">Goodman Gallery</a> (London, Cape Town, Johannesburg).</p><div><p>‘Ghada Amer – A Retrospective<br />A Woman's Voice is Revolution’<br />MUCEM Fort Saint-Jean, FRAC, La Vieille Charité<br />Marseille, France<br />December 2, 2022 – April 16, 2023</p></div><p>All photos and videos by Caroline Tompkins for Art Basel.</p>

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A major survey of the French-Egyptian artist’s work in Marseille showcases the breadth of her politically charged practice

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