Reflection On The Artist Speech
Ghada Amer is an Egyptian artist who specializes in painting, sculpture, and garden projects and is most known for her use of the embroidery to explore themes of female sexuality. My experience listening to her speak on Thursday was pleasant and enlightening.
I think Ghada providing context about her history of the various countries she has lived in at the beginning of the lecture was significant in understanding how it shaped her work as an artist. Ghada first explained how she was born in Egypt and moved to France at the age of eleven where she later pursued an art degree at an art school in Paris. She explained how painting was only taught to male students, and how she decided to embrace embroidery, a medium heavily associated with women’s work, as a form of painting instead. Ghada ended up using this medium throughout a lot of her subsequent works and I thought it was an interesting way to reclaim this medium and push a new message through it.
The subject matter of a lot of Ghada’s work is explicit; it uses images of women appropriated from pornographic magazines, which we know are primarily marketed for the eyes of men. I interpret this work as a criticism of the hypocrisy of how societally, female sexuality is shamed at the same time images of it are used for male pleasure. In a way, Ghada reclaims these images in a way that is liberating. She also explores this theme in her “Encyclopedia of Pleasure”, a sculpture of 57 cubes in which she embroidered segments of an old Arabic text that explored the role of sex as it relates to spirituality. The text, which has since been banned from Islamic society, comes from a world where the topic of human sexuality was widely accepted culturally and religiously, rather than vilified as it is today. And although this work specifically references this phenomenon as it relates to the religion of Islam, it could also be applied to the current values of many current major religions. I thought it was interesting to think about how something so instinctual and natural to human life has been suppressed and made into a taboo by the religions of today.
I think Ghada was successful in conveying the message of the themes explored in much of her other work, especially since she used parts of the texts only relating to female expression. It was also interesting to listen to her describe the process of creating her pieces. Although her use of mediums usually play a calculated role in the messages she tries to convey through her art, she explained how she is not afraid to experiment with different methods and mediums-- whether that be ceramics, sculpture, or garden projects. She thought of the artist as all-encompassing term and she felt that her creative potential would be limited if she stuck to one medium; she wanted to push her art in ways that would be new and dynamic. She also was not afraid of collaboration to attain this objective, and described her time working with artist Reza Farkhondeh to create many other works.
Overall, I had a pleasant experience at the artist talk and I learned a lot about her work. I think her subject matters and use of mediums was clever and effective in conveying her messages.
