“I believe that all women should like their bodies and use them as tools of seduction,” Ghada Amer stated; and in her well-known erotic embroideries, she at once rejects oppressive laws set in place to govern women’s attitudes toward their bodies and repudiates first-wave feminist theory that the body must be denied to prevent victimization.
Amer was born in Cairo in 1963. In 1974, her parents relocated to France where she began her artistic training 10 years later at Villa Arson, Nice, France. She currently lives and works in New York and has exhibited among others at the Venice Biennale, the Sydney Biennale, the Whitney Biennale, and the Brooklyn Museum.
In 1997, she was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, and in 1999, she received the UNESCO award at the Venice Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum New York; San Francisco Art Institute; De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam; Indianapolis Museum of Art; and the MACRO Museum, Rome. Her work has been exhibited in group shows at such venues as Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She participated among others in the Gwangju Biennale, the Whitney Bienniale and the Venice Biennale.