Ghada Amer - An Introduction

Since the 1970’s, feminist artists have been challenging the boundaries that divide art from craft, public from domestic, and masculine from feminine, by incorporating embroidery into their work. By taking this traditionally feminine and domestic form of creativity, artists have called attention to the complicated history of women’s needlework.

Ghada Amer was born in 1963, in Cairo, Egypt, but now works in both Paris and New York. Although Amer shares some of her feminist predecessors’ ideas, her works focus on the ideas of Western civilisations and gender ideologies.

A trip back to Cairo in 1988 provided her with inspiration as she saw how the veil had been pervasively adopted and how in fashion magazines, Egyptian veils were superimposed on Western fashions. This led her to work with themes of intersecting cultures and the woman’s position in all cultures. In Egypt, the veil can be seen as an instrument for containment of womans sexuality as well as a device for social control. Her work also has aspects of Islamic influence, such as the use of text or passages from the Qur’an but it is mostly concerned with women in a universal context. At the outset of her career, Amer reacted to the Islamic fundamentalism she was exposed to growing up in Cairo, later expanding to address the objectification of women throughout the world.