Ghada Amer’s sculptures, embroidery paintings, and public garden projects create unsettled narratives of longing and love. Clear-cut definitions and judgments have no place in her work, which is all about ambiguity and paradox. Her recent bronzes are conceived as rectangular, mostly horizontal partitions, folded just enough to allow them to stand upright on the floor. The vertical folds, complemented by horizontal folds at the top and bottom, reveal that these thin, freestanding polyptychs with ever-so-slightly warped skins have their origin in large sheets of cardboard typically used to construct boxes. Over-life-size, cropped portraits of anonymous young women appear on the front and back of these screens, with the crown of the head sliced away by the top edge of the support, and the face, hair, neck, and (occasionally) shoulder(s), arm(s), and hand(s) rendered with meaty lines modeled with the fingertips. These idealized women draw us in with languorous glances and tactile outlines, and then arrest us through the reductive stylizations of the source material, which Amer culled from pornographic photographs. Like her erotic embroideries, these works project a complex tenderness that denies objectification. The dripping lines, raised in relief, create the illusion of three-dimensional bodies that are, in fact, not there.
Michaël Amy: Are you a politically engaged artist?
Ghada Amer: I am not. To be a politically engaged artist means that you think you can change the world by making art. I do not believe this is possible. One must be willing to fight to change the world. I recall the quotation: “Art cannot change the world, but it can change someone who can change the world.” Artists can change the world indirectly. I am inspired by political issues. . .
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