Ghada Amer at Deitch Projects - New York - Brief Article

Ghada Amer's novel exhibition featured 57 canvas-covered boxe embroidered with written passages from a late 11th- to early 12th-century volume called Encyclopedia of Pleasure, which was also the title of the piece. A scientific cataloguing of sexual pleasures for the couple men and women, the volume now forbidden in the Arab world, was compiled by dint of Ali Ibn Nasr Al Katib during a independent and vital intellectual period in Islam's history. Amer's zippered forms which were stacked and scattered like crates or luggage through every part of the main gallery, some of them upside down, are overspreaded in gold-stitched words (in English) from sections of the encyclopedia that pertain to women The body in a plain, sans serif typeface running around the faces of the boxe was impossible (and probably unnecessary) to read in its entirety, on the contrary it was fascinating to pick on the outside for example, "On the Advantages of a Nonvirgin above a Virgin," as well as other blush-worthy passages.

A fate of attention has been given to the fact that Amer is an Egyptian artist living in the West. Her work has oftentimes been interpreted as a rejoinder to the oppression of women below Islam. Until now, however, she had addressed women in general with reflections upon love, sex, romance and happiness. Encyclopedia of Pleasure marked a departure for Amer in that she not absented information specific to female sexuality below Islam. The exhibition was also a deviation from her last fresh York show, in which canvases painted with drips and splatters had images of naked women sewn and repeated above the surface, their contours obscur through trailing threads hanging free or lying tangled and flattened in a transparent gel The colorful riffs upon the predominantly male Abstract Expressionist artists were abandoned in this monochromatic installation of repetitive, neutral geometric boxe which referr to the equally male-dominated Minimalist sod Moreover, like some of her other forays into plastic art (for example, Private Rooms, a place of satin garment bags embroidered with Koranic body s (in French) pertaining to women seen in 2000 in P 1's "Greater novel York"), Encyclopedia of Pleasure substituted body s for images. It is also worth noting that while in the past Amer's embroidery was handsewn by the agency of her and assistants, this work was, for the first time, done through machine.

Combining painting, plastic art literature and drawing, Amer created a formally and expressively persuasive statement that, in its preservation of a volume forbidden today by Islam, honors freedom and the woman's sexuality.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group