Crash Archives: An Interview For Ghada Amer's First Major Retrospective in Marseille
From December 2022 to April 2023, the first retrospective of Ghada Amer in France opened its doors in three places in Marseille: the Mucem the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and the chapel of the Centre de la Vieille Charité/Musées de Marseille. These three places have made it possible to articulate in three complementary parts this exhibition conceived by the Mucem under the curatorship of Hélia Paukner and Philippe Dagen.
Ghada Amer belongs to a generation of artists who arrived in the early 1990s in an art ecosystem where feminism was no longer in vogue. Decolonial and feminist studies were not yet on the agenda. I discovered her work during an exhibition at the Hôpital Ephémère in 1992, where she presented a set of canvases embroidered with female representations from the media and magazines. Her “translation” of the found and chosen images did not allow viewers to accurately date the situations represented, but only to glimpse a vision of the modern woman as it was put in place during “les trente glorieuses” in France, that is, after the end of the post-war restrictions from the 1960s onwards. The raw canvas played an important role in the balance of the compositions and evoked a construction based on a sort of frame delineated by the threads. The modern woman in a daily life which recalled, without the accumulation of household electric appliances, “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?” (1956), a work of manifest pop art, but with a conceptual side in order to deconstruct the codes of representations of women.
