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http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=4&article_id=8365
Ghada Amer's paradox of place
New York-based, Cairo-born artist wary of bringing home her potent mix of religion, politics and sex
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
BEIRUT: At a certain point, all artists in exile must wonder how their work would play out back home. Whether their absence is voluntary or forced, they must eventually take a mental gauge of the difference between an audience that might consider their work exotic and foreign, and an audience more critically and intimately familiar with where the work is coming from.
Ghada Amer left Cairo when she was a teenager. She returned on occasion to see her family, but she has otherwise spent her entire adult life in Paris and New York. Over the past 10 or 12 years, Amer has become so internationally well known in the art world that her name and her work are now recognizable on their own. She has eclipsed the need for such descriptive phrases as Egyptian painter or Middle Eastern artist. Yet in a month that marks three exhibitions of new work worldwide, Amer is circumspect about the consequences of her career.
"Let's face it," she says, speaking from Spain on the day before a major exhibition of her paintings, sculptures and drawings opens at the Institut Valencia d'Art Modern (IVAM). "My work will never be shown in any museums or public galleries in the Arab world."
In addition to the show at IVAM, Amer's work was featured in a group show earlier this month at Deitch Projects in New York called "The Freedom Salon," staged as a direct artistic affront to the Republican National Convention. On Friday, she will make her Los Angeles debut with an exhibition of new paintings, drawings and sculptures at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. In the meantime, the IVAM outing - on view through November and accompanied by an extensive full-color catalogue - is among the most comprehensive presentations of her artwork to date.
Such international scope is typical for Amer. She first broke onto the New York art scene in the mid-1990's with a show at Annina Nosei, a gallery known for unearthing local and international talent and responsible for introducing the world to such artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger, Shirin Neshat, and Jose Bedia. From there, Amer moved on to Deitch and Gagosian, both of which stand at the apex of the city's most credible and powerful contemporary art venues.
She has exhibited her work throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America. She has mounted public projects in Italy, Panama, South Korea, and more. She has won the Unesco prize from the Venice Biennale and a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She has given lectures, participated in conferences, done commissions. There is a veritable cottage industry of critical writing about her work.
But aside from two small gallery shows at Espace Karim Francis in Cairo, one at a gallery in Jerusalem, and a touring museum exhibition that touched down in Tel Aviv, Amer has shied away from doing anything in the region. This doesn't stem from a lack of interest. After all, she spent the past year serving on the jury for the ninth triennial Aga Khan award for architecture, a prize given to building projects that promote development and enrich culture in the Islamic world. The experience, she says, of working with a jury that included five architects, an engineer and two philosophers, was "fantastic."
Rather, Amer's reluctance to show her own art in the Arab world suggests both fear and frustration. It is troubling to her generally, as the Arab world is still the place she calls home, and specifically, because Egypt is still the country that pushed her to become an artist in the first place. It provided the conditions that inspired and challenged her and, at the same time, influenced and angered her. But in fairness, the form and content of her work certainly carries the potential to provoke audiences there.
On first glance, Amer's paintings look like bold works of Abstract Expressionism, canvases primed and doused with splashes of paint. But there is a texture and pattern to them as well. What appear to be drips reminiscent of Jackson Pollock are in fact tangles of thread hanging from an embroidered mesh of repeated images. Those images, reduced to stencil-like simplicity, depict women in poses of auto-erotic gratification. They are positions borrowed from the vocabulary of pornography and stitched into the language of art history. Overall, the paintings provoke an unexpected and often volatile collision between high-brow culture and low, masculine and feminine, gesture and trace, sexuality as a commodity sold and a pleasure indulged.
Although Amer is best known as a painter, she also creates sculptures, installations, public garden projects, prints, drawings and more. Consistent across all these modes of expression is a taste for saturated colors and lush materials, along with a tendency to build multiple layers of meaning into the work. She is forever pulling oppositional forces together, giving her pieces visual complexity and intellectual depth.
For an installation called "Private Rooms," she took 15 satin garment bags - each dyed a deep color - and embroidered into their fabric every passage from the Koran (translated from sacred Arabic into secular French) related to women, their bodies, gender and sex. In another installation titled "Encyclopedia of Pleasure," she took 57 boxes made of cotton cloth and covered them with gold thread, transcribing in English seven of the 42 chapters included in a medieval Islamic text of the same name, written in the late 10th or early 11th century by Abu Hasan Ali Ibn Nasr and intended to provide a comprehensive, scholarly study on human sexuality.
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