GHADA
Ghada Amers Artistic Battle against Woman Stereotypes
AMER
Born in 1963, Cairo, Egypt
Lives and works in New York
Education:
1989 MFA in Painting,Villa Arson
EPIAR, Nice, France.
http://www.ghadaamer.com
Sexuality as the Female Power:
G hada Amer is an Egyptian-born contemporary artist who has made herself known internationally with an impressive
body of work that includes paintings, drawings, embroidery, sculpture, and installations. Especially with her
elaborated embroidered paintings, Ghada Amer has challenged the traditional female representation in art in both her
unusual techniques and sexual-explicit subject matters.
To Amer, embroidery was a representation of the femininity with its fragility and
delicacy, while painting was invented by men and has been used exclusively by
them for centuries. Putting them both together was her way of replacing the
traditional artistic medium with a traditional womens medium to make sure
that the representation was coming from a female point of view. This is her artistic
response to a male-dominant art world, her attempt of balancing the feminine
and masculine, the negative and the positive, the tradition and the nontraditional.
In addition to using the inspirations from Abstract Expressionism, especially with
her threaded drips technique as a feminine counterpart of Jackson Pollocks
drip painting, as a way to challenge the male dominance aspect of the movement,
Amer also made loud statements for feminism in the subjects of her work.
Although her early works until the early 1990s portrayed women in stereotyped
domestic situations, Amer became well known for her controversial themes of
sexual pleasures and the use of pornographic imagery. The sensual images never
show signs of victimization or inferiority but they seem to reclaim a sense of strength and sexuality. Porn, traditionally
made by and for men, is transformed with Amers embroidery
work. By freeing the imagery from the objectifying context
of pornographic magazines, Amer liberates those women
from the submission of the male gaze and puts them into an
all-female space, giving them control over their own sexuality.
Through her work, Ghada Amer encourages women to
use their bodies as a vehicle of pleasure and instruments of
power, allying herself with a brand of gender politics often
referred as Third Wave Feminism or Post-Feminism.
Throughout her impressive body of work, whether in dialogue
with fairy tales characters, pornography, or the tradition
of Abstract Expressionism, Ghada Amer has successful
challenged the stereotypical image of the domestic-oriented,
submissive, objectified female with powerful and confident
woman figures who are comfortable with and in charge of
their sexuality.