‘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.
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, A Woman’s Voice Is Revolution (2022) contains multiple levels of feminist resonance.
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 A Woman’s Voice Is Revolution 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 Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – the decision that overturned constitutional rights to abortion access.
A staunch supporter of women’s self-determination, Amer has tirelessly challenged moralistic attitudes that seek to suppress bodily autonomy since the early 1980s. The artist sees taboos against abortion and pornography – or the religious veil – as cut from the same cloth. These prohibitions suggest that women are not free to control their own bodies. Her resulting oeuvre has continuously championed that fundamental right.
Early in her career, Amer began melding embroidery with painting to unite fine art and a craft associated with female makers. In the early 1990s, she incorporated stitched and drawn imagery of women from pornographic magazines and Disney cartoons into these mixed-media creations. Simultaneously, Amer created installations with text, fabric, and other materials that confronted stereotypes about sexism and terrorism. Since the 2010s, Amer has added sculpture to her growing list of mediums. And, most recently, she has made portrait-style paintings in thread and acrylic, layering illustrations of women’s faces with quotes and slogans about women’s empowerment (or men’s fears about their growing power.) She commenced these portrait-style paintings in 2013, using images of women’s faces drawn from erotic magazines. The recent series ‘The Women I Know’(2020–), based on photographs of Amer’s family and friends, even includes a self-portrait. ‘Historically, women were only allowed to paint portraits of other women,’ she explains, ‘if they were allowed to paint at all.’
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 Venus magazine, which she has described as ‘Vogue for the veiled woman.’ The spreads in Venus 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 Venus that Amer started experimenting with pattern, collage, and embroidery in her work.
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 Venus 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 – another example of imposing control over women's bodies. The show will also include installations such as Encyclopedia of Pleasure (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.’
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).
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 sculpteur (sculptor) with an extra ‘e’ to render it feminine – a word that doesn’t exist in French. (The word for a female sculptor is sculptrice.) 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.
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.
—Wendy Vogel
Wendy Vogel is a writer and independent curator based in New York. She contributes regularly to Artforum and Art in America, among other publications. She is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in Short-Form Writing.
Ghada Amer is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery (New York), Tina Kim Gallery (New York), Kewenig (Berlin, Palma de Mallorca), Goodman Gallery (London, Cape Town, Johannesburg).
‘Ghada Amer – A Retrospective
A Woman's Voice is Revolution’
MUCEM Fort Saint-Jean, FRAC, La Vieille Charité
Marseille, France
December 2, 2022 – April 16, 2023
All photos and videos by Caroline Tompkins for Art Basel.
