GHADA AMER Breathe Into Me

GAG OS I A N GA LLE RY

GHADA AMER

GAG OS I A N GA LLE RY

GHADA AMER
some kiss we want
There is some kiss we want with our whole lives, the touch of Spirit on the body. Seawater begs the pearl to break its shell. And the lily, how passionately it needs some wild Darling! At night, I open the window and ask the moon to come and press its face into mine. Breathe into me. Close the language-door, and open the love-window. The moon wont use the door, only the window. jelaluddin rumi

Breathe into Me

GAG OS I A N GA LLE RY

PLEASURE / PRINCIPLE
Maria Elena Buszek

Feminism must increase womens pleasure and joy, not just decrease our misery.
carole s. vance 1

Feminism can be empowered by seduction.

ghada amer 2

few topics have caused more debate within the long history of feminism than those of sexuality and pleasure. Since the late eighteenth century feminist activists, scholars, and artists have tangled with the issue of whether the representation of womens pleasure liberates them from or enforces traditional patriarchal notions of womanhood. While feminist thinkers have offered a wide and inuential range of contemporary discourse on the ways in which women are victimized and manipulated through the representation of pleasure, Ghada Amer is part of a long tradition of others who have argued for the necessity of pleasurein all its complex manifestationsas both an activist strategy and a human right. Naturally, nding visual languages that perform this task has been difcultas many artists have learned, efforts to incorporate the highly individualized yet powerful realm of pleasure with the consensus-seeking goals of politics are downright impossible. As bell hooks has put this conundrum for feminism: It has been a simple task for women to describe and criticize negative aspects of sexuality as it has been socially constructed in sexist society; to expose male objectication and dehumanization of women; to denounce rape, pornography, sexualized violence, incest, etc. It has been a far more difcult task for women to envision new sexual paradigms, to change the norms of sexuality.3 It is undeniable that representations of women in both the art world and popular culture have frequently portrayed womanhood according to patriarchal myths that feminism has sought to deny. Yet women have always found pleasure and even power in these very representa-

opposite The Reign of Terror, 2005 Installation at the Davis Museum & Cultural Center, Wellesley College

opposite Love Grave (detail), 2003 Installation at the Indianapolis Museum of Art September 13 November 30, 2003

right Encylopedia of Pleasure (detail), 2001 Mixed media with embroidery; Dimensions variable

tionsrepresentations that feminism has also provided women with strategies for subverting. Thankfully, many women artists nd in the truth of both these positions a challenge that has led to attempts to represent the very contradiction of feminist sexuality in their work. Indeed, the paradoxical nature of the issue has forced feminist thinkers to approach feminism itself as a political paradox, not as a singular feminism but as multiple feminisms, which are, like pleasure itself, simultaneously individual and (like the communities they produce) inevitably somehow common. In her revolutionary and highly inuential Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway argues that this paradoxical image of feminism, like that of many activist cultures today, is tempered by the sense of self-awareness with which the movement rst encouraged women to approach their lives and choices. Haraways call for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction4 is a rethinking of

the popular feminist rallying cry the personal is the politicalone that explicitly takes into account the issues of pleasure, diversity, and agencythat captures the spirit of art and activism in our contemporary, third wave of feminist history. In a recently published forum on this history, Peggy Phelan points out the degree to which the resulting ambivalenceas she puts it, in the fullest sense of that term of contemporary feminist thought reects the increasingly selfcritical, multicultural, and relativist postmodern world in which its third wave emerged. Indeed, as Phelan asserts, not only did the womens movement make this ambivalence a necessary worldview, In these days of hideous fundamentalism, the capacity to acknowledge ambivalence is revolutionary.5 Ghada Amer has built a remarkable career around work that revels in the political potential of pleasure, paradox, and ambivalencework that symbolizes not only the condition of our contemporary existence but

at left & opposite Love Park, 1999 Installation at the Third International Biennial, SITE Santa Fe

the new resources that women are stocking in their war chest as they confront the fundamentalism that still exists there. Indeed, the subject of fundamentalism is a consistent and meaningful one in not only Amers work but also in her biography. An Egyptianborn, French-raised-and-educated artist residing in New York, much is frequently made of the role her heavily hyphenated international identity plays in her work as she applies Western erotic imagery of ecstatic, sexualized women to works that defy fundamentalist Islamic taboos against the expression of female sexuality. Similarly, critics often discuss Amers position between the essentialist, second-wave French feminist thought in which she was educateda feminist fundamentalism that many argue had a chilling effect on womens self-expression as the popular images and genres Amer appropriates came to be dismissed by many feminist thinkers as inherently sexistand the largely American, constructionist ideas

of sex and gender that the third wave has embraced as a challenge to it. In the erotic paintings for which she is best known, Amers use of female porn stars and pinups derived from commercial erotica dees the dogmatic rigidity of both conservative Islam and radical feminism, not to mention calls attention to their occasional and strange common ground on the subject of sexuality. But Amers strategic manipulation of the source material at the same time speaks to the nourishment she derives from the very cultures that she critiques: as viewers wade through the tangle of pseudo-drips that constitute the embroidered lines of her paintings, they realize that the artist is denying them the frank sexual exhibitionism with which we associate the images she appropriates, as the expressive hands and faces of her gures ultimately do the most speaking for the acts and sensations that we can often only presume to be there. In this way, Amer

above Today 70% of the Poor in the World are Women (Hoy el 70% de los pobres en el mundo son mujeres), 2001 Installation in La Rambla del Raval, Barcelona

suggests the inevitably unrepresentable, unknowable pleasures of her women as stressed in essentialist feminist thought, as well as the mysteries of sexuality sanctied in Islam. Her two monumental new works Big Black Kansas City Painting (2005) and Knotty But Nice (2005) nd Amer approaching both the imagery she appropriates and the cultures she addresses with a simultaneous dose of criticism and affectiona reservation of the right to claim both/and that stands as her protest against those intent on asking women to accept either/or. While Amers battle against fundamentalism is consistently noted in criticism of her work, rarely addressed is the degree to which terms such as East and West, essence and construct are themselves refused a fundamental denition by Amer. While her insistence on referring to her embroidered canvases as paintings is a pointed rebellion against a male art professorin France, not Egyptwho

refused to teach women the masculine art of painting, she simultaneously, contradictorily insists on referencing the feminine nature of needlework and ber arts as no less an act of deance. She appropriates the image of the sexualized woman as an icon of feminist sexuality, yet she has frequently dismissed her source material as sexist. She conjures the power of fairy tales to transcend the coarse realities of the real world, but rails against the manner in which women are rewarded within them for their vanity and masochism. She speaks thoughtfully of her liberating discoveries of perspective, the nude, and classical music while studying art in France, even as she recognizes the problematic, compulsory nature of this cultural (re)education. Her brilliant Encyclopedia of Pleasure (2001) demonstrates how deftly she circumvents any efforts to pin down her identication on either side of limiting binaries relating to culture or identity: named

after a medieval Islamic compilation of international texts concerning human sexuality, which has been banned in the Muslim world since the seventeenth century, this Amer work culled passages on womens pleasure and stitched them in English onto zippered boxes scattered like packing crates around the gallery. On the one hand, the piece speaks to her rejection of conservative Islams contemporary position on womens sexuality; on the other, dedicated as the sacred Encyclopedia was to Allah, Amers work also references and educates Western audiences on the lesser-known fact that in Islam sexual pleasure is to be celebrated as a divine gift. In this piece, Amer rejects neither Islamic culture nor her adopted Western culture, but wants to claim bothas they already exist, in both history and herselfin terms of their forgotten or unspoken realities, and against dogma and stereotypes that would continue to push such complex realities under the rug.

As this piece demonstrates, Amers ambivalence is neither an apolitical nor a nihilistic onequite the opposite: in the tradition of art-activism since Dada, her ambivalent position is committed to the necessity of keeping contradictions in plain view. Not so that their messiness will stand in the way of understanding them, but so the realities that give rise to these contradictions might save us from jettisoning them too easily in favor of the quick x, the pat answer. Granted, the paradoxes with which Amer plays do not make for useful agitpropindeed, the artist herself is quite resigned to the political futility of art when she states: I believe in political commitment, but I do not think that artbe it a painting or a bookcan change society.6 Yet she clearly believes in the power of art to pose the questions that society itself might feel compelled to step up and try to answer. Her recent installation Reign of Terror (2005) is among her most clearly politicized to date, even as it

10

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left Peace Garden, 2002 Installation at Miami Beach Botanical Garden

maintains her levelheaded dedication to assuming many positions at once. In this piece at Wellesley College, the artist created a lush, ornamental pattern to wallpaper the lobby of its Davis Museum, as well as adorn the napkins, place mats, and cups of the museums cafeteria. The luscious, swirling pink-andgreen patternin much the same way as her paintingsgives way upon close scrutiny to reveal something quite different: complex denitions of the word terrorism, as they have appeared in English-language dictionaries since the eighteenth century, presented against historical denitions in Arabic dictionaries. Or, rather, the lack thereof: in Arabic dictionaries, there is no word or denition for terrorism. Does Amer wish for audiences to make note of the anxiety that terrorism has bred in English-speakers since, technically, acts of terrorism led to the United States independence from England? Does she wish for audiences to marvel that a term so closely associ-

ated with Arabic culture would be either so ingrained or denied an aspect of its everyday life that it does not merit a denition? Does she wish to draw attention to the profound disparities possible between different cultures respective ideas of justice, freedom, and oppression that give way to fear and warfare? And does Amers ability to pull her audiences in all these different directions, toward seemingly unanswerable questions, negate her political stance? Its a risky stance, to be sure, but one that speaks honestly to the complexities of politics and political action. As Laura Auricchio has written in her appropriately complex analyses of Amers work, the artist constantly situates herself as a gure in exilealways out of place. Rather than lament or decry this experience, she revels in and shares her outsider status by revealing the constant state of interaction among all cultures and shatter[ing] the illusions of cultural purity.7 Is it any wonder, then, that the elusive yet politically charged

subject of pleasureas expressed in both its physical and emotional manifestationsis one to which we nd Amer returning again and again, as a rare constant that stands amid all these interactions? Amers work reminds us thatman or woman, gay or straight, Eastern or Western, and all permutations possible between these poles of existencelove and its uncertainties may be among the few things that actually bind and dene humanity.8 Drawing attention to the provocative ambiguities and frequent intermingling of Pain, Absence, Longing, Torment and Desire in our lives, Amer constantly asks that we contemplate their persistence, their relevance, and especially their beauty. For whether their beauty is treacherous or generous, its immediate sensation is that of pleasureand Amer understands the inevitable pull of pleasure, the seductiveness of which she exploits in work that forces us to recognize, as Wendy Steiner does in The Scandal of Pleasure, arts potential to show us the relation between what we respond to and what we are, between our pleasure and our principles. As a result, it inevitably relates us to other people whose pleasures and principles either do or do not coincide with our own.9 In Amers garden pieces we see this comparison/ conation of pleasure and principle very much at work. As differently as they appear to function from her paintings, they in fact build on the same themes and interactions. They present monumental abstractions with narrative subtexts of love, loneliness,

women, sexuality,10 but take the form of outdoor installations manipulating or creating parklike settings in which audiences, by physically participating in the works, complete them. From inviting children to play in an enormous sandbox in a fashionable Barcelona park that literally spells out to their families the unsettling fact that Today 70% of the Poor in the World are Women (2001), to a Peace Garden (2002) that lives only when audiences sacricially offer up handy insects to the carnivorous plants arranged in a peace sign, Amers garden pieces turn the paradoxes she asks us to contemplate in her gallery work into paradoxes that we ponder through performance. In her Love Park (1999), we nd a particularly compelling example of this expanding body of work, one that leads us back to the necessity and potential of a feminist politics of pleasure. The piece cleverly manipulates the accoutrements of modern public parksbenches and instructional signageinto what the artist has compared to the deaf conversation11 that persists in our allegedly culturally sensitive, politically correct world. In Love Park, the two-seater benches common in park settings are recongured so that the couples for which they seem to have been designed must sit facing away from each otherand each facing toward different signs in which park rules have been replaced by uncredited and contradictory quotes culled from literary sources that pres-

12

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below Ying Yang Garden, 20022005 Installation at the 51st Venice Biennale

ent various male and female authors perspectives on love. Wandering and resting in this idyllic urban promenade, audiences are left to wonder against this seductive, familiar backdrop: which of these quotes were penned by men? by women? does the artist want to inspire each pair to dialogue? to debate? An answer to Amers intentions for the piece seems to be presented in one of the signs themselves: Experience shows us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but looking in the same direction. And paradoxically, as ever, Amer leads us in this same direction by directing us to face apart, to question our principles beyond the constraints of the particular positions, afliations, and borders by which we generally dene (and limit) those principlesreturning us to Haraways call for feminists to promote pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction, which the best of Amers work does with tremendous insight and generosity.

endnotes
1. Carole S. Vance, Pleasure and Danger: Toward a Politics of Sexuality, in Vance (ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, 2nd ed. (New York: Pandora, 1992): 24. 2. Ghada Amer: Gagosian Gallery, The Art Newspaper, no. 125 (May 2002). 3. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000): 150. 4. Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991): 150. 5. Peggy Phelan, Feminism and Art: Nine Views, Artforum 42, no. 2 (October 2003):14849. 6. Estelle Taraud, Interview with Ghada Amer, Studies in TwentiethCentury Literature 26, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 239. 7. Laura Auricchio, Works in Translation: Ghada Amers Hybrid Pleasures, Art Journal (Winter 2001): 32, 33. 8. Rosa Martnez, [Interview with] Ghada Amer, Make: The Magazine of Womens Art, no. 92 (2002): 73. 9. Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995): 59. 10. Martnez, [Interview with] Ghada Amer, 74. 11. Martnez, [Interview with] Ghada Amer, 74.

14

PAINTINGS

Trini

2005

18

Another Spring

2005

20

Black and White RFGA

2005

22

The Big Black Kansas City Painting RFGA

2005

24

GATEFOLD

Julias Pink

2005

26

Seven Grey Roses of Sadness

2005

28

The Purple Lady and The Princesses RFGA

2005

30

The Diplomat and His Beloved Wife

2005

32

Knotty but Nice

2005

34

GATEFOLD

35

KSKC

2005

36

I Do Not Love You

2005

38

Andys Princess and the Pea

2005

40

Desire
42

2005

Pain

2005

Torment

2005

Absence

2005

Longing

2005

Black Abscence
48

2005

Black Torment

2005

Black Longing

2005

Black Pain

2005

Black Desire

2005

WORKS ON PAPER

Princesses

2005

Tinkerbell

2004

The White Man

2005

The Indian

2005

The Pink Cowboy

2005

Curfew 67

2005

Black Bouquet

2005

Targets

2005

PLATE LIST
pa i n t i n g s w o r k s o n pa p e r

Trini, 2005 Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas 66 x 79 inches (167.6 x 200 cm)

Knotty but Nice, 2005 Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas 108 x 144 inches (274.3 x 365.8 cm)

Longing, 2005 Embroidery and gel medium on canvas 26 x 18 inches (66 x 45.7 cm)

Princesses, 2005 Ink crayon and embroidery on paper 22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches (57.2 x 72.4 cm)

Another Spring, 2005 Embroidery and gel medium on canvas 78 x 72 inches (198 x 182.9 cm)

KSKC, 2005 Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas 64 x 76 inches (162.6 x 193 cm)

Black Desire, 2005 Embroidery and gel medium on canvas 26 x 18 inches (66 x 45.7 cm)

Tinkerbell, 2004 Mixed medium and embroidery on paper 28 x 22 1/2 inches (72.4 x 57.2 cm)

Black and White RFGA, 2005 Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas 48 x 60 inches (122 x 152.4 cm)

I Do Not Love You, 2005 Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas 64 X 72 inches (162.6 x 182.8 cm)

Black Pain, 2005 Embroidery and gel medium on canvas 26 x 18 inches (66 x 45.7 cm)

The White Man, 2005 Ink and embroidery on paper 28 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches (72.4 x 57.2 cm)

The Big Black Kansas City Painting RFGA, 2005 Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas 108 x 144 inches (274.3 x 365.8 cm)

Andys Princess and the Pea, 2005 Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas 63 X 78 inches (160 x 198.1 cm)

Black Torment, 2005 Embroidery and gel medium on canvas 26 x 18 inches (66 x 45.7 cm)

The Indian, 2005 Mixed media and embroidery on paper 28 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches (72.4 x 57.2 cm)

Julias Pink, 2005 Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas 64 x 76 inches (162.6 x 193 cm)

Desire, 2005 Embroidery and gel medium on canvas 26 x 18 inches (66 x 45.7 cm)

Black Absence, 2005 Embroidery and gel medium on canvas 26 x 18 inches (66 x 45.7 cm)

The Pink Cowboy, 2005 Acrylic, crayon ink and embroidery on paper 28 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches (72.4 x 57.2 cm)

Seven Grey Roses of Sadness, 2005 Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas 66 x 79 inches (167.6 x 200.7 cm)

Pain, 2005 Embroidery and gel medium on canvas 26 x 18 inches (66 x 45.7 cm)

Black Longing, 2005 Embroidery and gel medium on canvas 26 x 18 inches (66 x 45.7 cm)

Curfew 67, 2005 Acrylic, crayon ink and embroidery on paper 28 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches (72.4 x 57.2 cm)

The Purple Lady and The Princesses RFGA, 2005 Acrylic, embroidery, and gel medium on canvas 79 x 66 inches (200 x 167.6 cm)

Torment, 2005 Embroidery and gel medium on canvas 26 x 18 inches (66 x 45.7 cm)

Black Bouquet, 2005 Acrylic, crayon, ink and stickers on paper 28 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches (72.4 x 57.2 cm)

The Diplomat and His Beloved Wife, 2005 Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas 78 x 62 inches (198.1 x 157.5 cm)

Absence, 2005 Embroidery and gel medium on canvas 26 x 18 inches (66 x 45.7 cm)

Targets, 2005 Mixed media and embroidery on paper 28 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches (72.4 x 57.2 cm)

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THE LAWS OF ABSTRACTION

Christophe Kihm

the large-format canvases presented by Ghada Amer at Gagosian Gallery reiterate two compositional characteristics of this artists work: they reprise imagery from porn magazines and replay it on the surface of the canvas using the techniques of embroidery and painting. Much has been written about these iconographic and technical registers of Amers work and about the meaning brought into play by their combination in the symbolic order. The new series of works offers another occasion to discuss this, for there is no doubt that their power and singularity rests on the solidarity between images and techniques within a symbolic construction. At the same time it provides an opportunity to redene the terms of the work. This solidarity sustains a whole working process,and it concerns, in the rst place, the operations of selecting, dropping out, and transferring images as applied to pornographic photographs published in magazines. With these three actionstaking a body from a magazine, transferring it, and outlining its surfacethe artist combines three effects of decontextualization. In sequence, these three operations efface the original pornographic scene and allow for the emergence of new images: silhouettes of bodies create a space on a canvas. We can now see how the pornographic referent, linked to a media channel that assigns a particular spatial position to female bodies, partially disappears in the painting by virtue of erasure. Objectively, this scenographic referent retains only a very slight role in the formal process implemented by the artist. In fact, it is conspicuous by its absence.

opposite Private Rooms (detail), 1998 Embroidery on satin with metal bar; Dimensions variable

67

opposite Grey Big Figures on White, 2005 Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas 70 x 59 inches (177.8 x 149.9 cm)

The technique of erasure contradicts the critical vision which stipulates that this work should express moral condemnation of the porn industry and the exploitation of women thought to occur within it. It also points us in another direction. For what is left of the images produced by that industry are postures and poses that, severed from their contextthat is to say, without reference to any anecdoteare rearticulated by operations of selection. It is on this condition that images can leave one space to create another, that bodies can become the orthonormalized markers of a canvas whose rhythms and forms they invent, where they become autonomous and gain in presence. Within the production process carried out by Ghada Amer, erasure therefore functions as an abstraction, in the sense of lifting out (abstrahere in Latin), of isolating by thought or action. In such an artistic approach, the action of separating and isolating is the one whereby an object is endowed with a new quality. A new hypothesis can thus be formulated: by cutting out and outlining photographed bodies from magazines, by materializing their surfaces on canvas, Ghada Amer is above all reframing images (we could indeed note the presence of the same working process in the drawings, for all the technical differences between embroidery and line). If a liberation does occur here, it is the liberation not of women but of images of women. Liberation occurs because the process of abstraction implemented by the artist restores a quality to the images: it gives the

bodies represented the luxury of a new identity that neither denies nor falsies their status as icons. According to the laws of this abstraction, in order to obtain the image of an image, you need to strip down its imagery. The reframing of the image is tantamount to a new denition. We move from an anecdotal photograph (images from porn magazines) to a generic form (the sphere of female sexuality). The symbolic crux of this iconographic montage is the result of subtle reversal: girls posing nude in front of the camerawe imagine them to be porn stars or exotically monikered pinupsgo back to being women who are necessarily anonymous. (The title of one of Amers paintings, Black and White RFGA, indicates the degree to which the power of the generic is activated by these operations of transformation.) This practice of abstraction, which leads to a new denition of bodies and postures, needs to be seen in relation to Amers work on language, which proceeds in a similar way, except that it uses as its supporting material excerpts from dictionaries and encyclopediaswhich, needless to say, are the very loci of denition. The series of canvases shown in this exhibition, which propose denitions of terms belonging to the vocabulary of amorous disappointment and frustrated passionPain, Longing, Absence, Torment, Desireoffers an example of this practice of abstraction that could not be more explicit. Their generic dimension is also underscored by their identical formats, techniques, and typography. As for their singularity, that is determined by variations in their colors.

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Abstraction, as practiced by Ghada Amerthat of one image from another, of a word or text from a bookplays not so much on the relations between model and copy as on the creation of motifs. The motif here comes from a pattern, as in sewing (a tracing is a canonic form of this). It is by the mediation of a pattern, a schema to be applied, that the process of transforming the image is set in motion in this work. And just as any pattern brings the twofold promise of both reproduction and variation, the objects generated by the application of the patterns used here (images and texts) have the complementary characteristics of identity and difference. They can be multiplied or modied, their size increased or reduced, and so on. The motif produced by the pattern, whether an image or a text, is thus subjected to a dialectical process. In this regard, no motif is linked solely to either the intensication (the leitmotif) or the loss (mechanical repetition) of meaning. For while the motif always imparts a rhythm, and if it sets in motion speed and time, it also impresses onto the surface of the painting a mobility, a dynamic, and a tension: it sets in process the structure of the work as a combinatory logic. On the surface of Amers canvases, two complementary manual gestures combine: sewing (that which ties and holds) and painting (that which impacts and ows). Sewing implies an exercise in time, which calls for patience and application; marked by melancholy, it is an exercise that measures time without ever managing to stop its ow. In contrast, painting involves a sudden,

brutal action that activates impulsion and destructionin an almost vitalist form. In these combinations of rhythms, times, and actions motifs are determined that are hidden by tapering or camouage, or are revealed by underlining or variation. With this second montage, in which iconography and technique are redeployed under the aegis of movement, rhythms and repetitions are woven which, when applied to the images and texts treated as motifs, invite us to look over the maps and reliefs of desire. A new symbolic construction emerges, since in the tying and untying of embroidery and painting the subtle play of an erotics is formulated.

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published for the exhibition

GHADA AMER
Breathe into Me
January 21 February 25, 2006 Gagosian Gallery 555 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011 t. 212.741.1111 www.gagosian.com Publication 2006 Gagosian Gallery Pleasure/Principal 2006 Maria Elena Buszek The Laws of Abstraction 2006 Christophe Kihm

gagosian gallery coordinators

Valentina Castellani, Alison McDonald, Natasha Roje, and Ealan Wingate

copy editor
Don Kennison All artworks Ghada Amer Photography by Rob McKeever

design by
Giampietro+Smith

printed by
TranscontinentalLitho Acme, Montreal Ghada Amer would like to thank Reza Farkhondeh for his collaboration, support, and for the RFGA. Amalia Mario, Heather Gutierrez, and Julia Chiang for their tremendous work in studio production. Everyone at Gagosian, particularly: Larry Gagosian, Andisheh Avini, Valentina Castellani, Melissa Lazarov, Tom Pilgrim, and Ealan Wingate. The H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute for their help in producing Big Black Kansas City Painting RFGA and Knotty But Nice. All the embroiderers: Anna Alfredson, Nancy Bach, Jennifer Boe, Audra Brandt, Kate Brown, Andy Byers, Callyann Casteel, Maureen Cavanaugh, Dustin Condley, Peter Demos, Erin Dhal, Burak Duvenci, Laura Frank, Samantha Fraser, Heather Hendrix-Russell, Hadley Johnson, Lisa Marie Kettlewell, Erin McAllister, Lauren McEntire, Shipra Misra, Anne Muntgees, Emily Sall, Anji Shirai, Trini Soelaeman, Maranda Stebbins, and Jaimie Warren. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission from the copyright holders. isbn 1-932598-25-1