A Woman's Voice Is Revolution

The exhibition "Ghada Amer" is the first retrospective of the artist in France. Born in Cairo in 1963, Ghada Amer moved to Nice in 1974 with her parents. Some ten years later, she studied at the Villa Arson before joining the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques in Paris. Revolted by the difficulty of asserting herself as a painter in the 1980s, and a fortiori as a woman painter, Ghada Amer developed a body of work of canvases and embroidered installations as well as sculptures and gardens, through which painting gradually asserts itself. In 1999, she was invited by Harald Szeemann to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, where she received the UNESCO prize. Since 1996, she has lived and worked in New York.

In three sites in Marseille, the retrospective brings together the different modes of plastic expression of the Franco-Egyptian artist, from her beginnings to her most recent creations:

- At the Mucem (Fort Saint-Jean, GHR), the artist's transcultural and international career will be highlighted. The East, its perception by the West, the translatability of one culture into another, religion, the status of women, current events: all themes of which Ghada Amer delivers a personal, committed and nuanced vision, asserting herself as one of the great voices of the current debates on the postcolonial issues of creation. A sculpture-garden will be created outside, at Fort Saint-Jean. Unpublished photographs of the work produced will be integrated into the work.

- At the Frac PACA: for Ghada Amer, the question of women condition transcends that of cultural or religious affiliation. Resolutely feminist, she has seized as a painter the traditionally feminine medium of embroidery. Between tribute and claim, her paintings are in dialogue with the masters of an art history too long dominated by men. Beyond that, they establish their identity through a jubilant creative power and a new interest for the portrait.

- At the Vieille Charité chapel: through exciting transfers from one technique to another, Ghada Amer's pictorial experiments invest the field of sculpture - through installations and landscape sculptures, but also through ceramic and bronze works recently pushed towards monumentality.

The book will have the same title for all three venues (although the exhibitions will have three different titles).