Ghada Amer

Witches and Bitches

Curators: Hélia Paukner and Philippe Dagen

Exhibition devised and organised by the Mucem in partnership with the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and les Musées de Marseille - Centre de la Vieille Charité.

The exhibition “Ghada Amer” is the first retrospective of the artist in France. Taking place in three venues (the Mucem, the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and the chapel of the Centre de la Vieille Charité), it brings together the different modes of plastic expression of the Franco-American-Egyptian artist, from her beginnings to her most recent creative work.

Ghada Amer, Portrait Of The Revolutionary Woman [portrait de la femme révolutionnaire], 2017 Grès cérame avec incrustations de porcelaine et barbotine de porcelaine Collection privée, Munich (Allemagne)
© Ghada Amer, photo : Christopher Burke Studios

Born in Cairo in 1963, Ghada Amer moved to Nice with her parents in 1974. She studied at the Villa Arson before joining the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques in Paris. Outraged by the difficulty of asserting herself as a painter in the 1980s – and all the more as a woman painter – Ghada Amer developed a body of work consisting of embroidered canvases and installations as well as sculptures and gardens, through which her painting gradually asserted itself. In 1999, she was invited by Harald Szeemann to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, where she received the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts.
Since 1996 she has lived and worked in New York.

At the Mucem (Fort Saint-Jean, Georges Henri Rivière building and the Jardin des Migrations) - from 2 December 2022 to 16 April 2023
Ghada Amer, East - الغرب - الشرق - Occident

At the Mucem, the artist’s transcultural and international career takes centre stage: the so-called Orient, its perception by the West, the translatability of one culture into another, religion, and the status of women are all themes on which Ghada Amer delivers a personal, committed, and nuanced vision, asserting herself as one of the great postcolonial voices in contemporary art. Ghada Amer’s first garden-sculpture (in Arabic), A Woman’s Voice Is Revolution, is presented in the threshing area of the Fort’s gardens from 17 September 2022 to 16 April 2023.

At the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur
Ghada Amer, Witches and Bitches

For Ghada Amer, the question of women transcends that of cultural or religious affiliation. Resolutely feminist, she has taken up the traditionally feminine medium of embroidery as a painter. Between homage and vindication, her paintings enter into a dialogue with the “masters” of an art history that has been dominated by men for too long. They develop from Amer’s jubilant creative power and reveal her interest in a new kind of portraiture.

At the chapel of the Centre de la Vieille Charité, Musées de Marseille - from 2 December 2022 to 16 April 2023
Ghada Amer, Sculptor

Deploying a range of techniques, Ghada Amer’s pictorial experimentations enrich the field of sculpture through installations and landscape sculptures, as well as ceramic and bronze works recently pushed in the direction of monumentality.