"DOBLE FILO". GHADA
AMER and SHIRIN NESHAT.
From Janary 25th to March 16th 2002.
“Double Edged” is a dual exhibition: of
Ghada Amer and Shirin Neshat, two female artists who have chosen to live
in New York, but who come from the same geopolitical region, namely the
Near East. Both are already well known in the contemporary international
art panorama and reveal the same preoccupations when it comes to formulating
their artistic and theoretic postulates. From different, but albeit converging
perspectives and techniques, both artists denounce the situation of subordination
of the women’s collective in the world. Both offer new images that
question the patriarchal stereotypes behind this discrimination and share
the practice of art with a decidedly social vocation, art that is specifically
designed to criticise and intervene socially.
Ghada Amer
The exhibition is of previously existing work of the artists,
who share the exhibition space as equal neighbours. Ghada Amer (1963,
El Cairo, Egypt), acclaimed for her abstract paintings that she further
enhances with erotic embroidery motives, asserts the creative power of
women and questions the oppression to which they are subjected. As critic
and art commissar, Rosa Martínez, has pointed out, the pictorial
work of Ghada Amer incorporates a feminine universe (that of sewing and
embroidery) into a traditionally masculine field (that of abstract painting).
The intimacy of her paintings is complemented with the social impact of
her interventions in public spaces, which she uses to demand the right
of women to abandon their purely domestic environment and occupy, both
politically, and artistically, territories that have been denied to them
down through history.
Ghada Amer considers sewing and gardening as being specifically
feminine activities and has designed parks and carried out extremely beautiful
floral compositions in such different places as the Roman Theatre of Sagunto
(Valencia, Spain, 1998), the SITE Santa Fe Park (New Mexico, USA, 1999),
the Metropolitan Museum of Pusan (Korea, 2000). She exhibited her latest
piece of work: a garden of sand, entitled “At present, 70% of the
world’s poor are women”, in the Rambla del Raval in Barcelona
last summer. In Double Edged, the artist exhibits photographic documentation
of these urban interventions.
Shirin Neshat
On the other hand, Shirin Neshat (1957, Qazvin, Iran),
who cannot exhibit in the country in which she was born, is world famous
for her black and white portraits of Islamic women wearing chadors. Shirin
Neshat is an expert in the policies and aesthetics of exclusion; her photographs
and video installations generate a circular flow of senses that serve
to question a world of rules and regulators. She toys with tradition,
but reinvents it by including things that throw it out of kilter. The
presence of a chador as the central element to her work is done in her
pursuit to create a new identity; she tries to illustrate that the chador
has not been completely successful in completely annihilating the person
it is wrapped around and binds. The chador reveals the subliminal power
of every repressive apparatus and, by playing with our preconceptions,
fears and judgements, manages to turn traditional significance back to
front in order to reconstruct new, and completely different meanings.
By including an element of violence, she questions the entire social regulatory
system used to repress women, turning the chador and the person wearing
it into a mirror reflecting the violence suffered, giving elements their
basic and original meanings. With her “bodily” portrayals of
this “Islamic woman”, Shirin illustrates the unwritten chronicle
of a mute and concealed femininity. Her work shows and tells what she
has been forbidden to show and tell. It witnesses the story of a refusal
and, in turn, her own refusal to accept this fate. “Anchorage”
(1996), the video exhibition displayed in Double Edged, tackles all of
these matters in a surprising fashion.
“Double Edged”, the title of the exhibition,
makes reference to the play of duality that shrouds the artists and the
exhibition concept (comradeship, double nationality, the false bottom
of apparently simple matters, etc...), but, above all, and more specifically,
refers to the basic conceptual tool these two artists use in their work:
the concept of femininity in patriarchal societies. Femininity, a masculine
construction, is the “Double Edged” weapon, since it serves
to keep women in a state of second-class citizenship but, as these artists
demonstrate, when this is reversed, can also be used as a missile with
which to defy patriarchy. By cultivating and reinventing contents or techniques
traditionally related to women, Ghada Amer and Shirin Neshat create new
images that deconstruct that of passive, submissive women. In this task,
and at the same time, these two women from the Middle East who live in
the West, offer the western world stereotyped portraits that we have constructed
on “the other”, “the exotic”, “the Third World”,
thus ridiculing our colonialist vision. In Double Edged, not only patriarchy,
but also colonialism is questioned and special emphasis is placed on the
dual role the artist interprets: art related to the environment in which
it appears. Art is always a reflection of status quo, though sometimes,
as happens here, it also provides us with models with which to change
it. With their art, Ghada Amer and Shirin Neshat contribute to creating
a world that does not discriminate between sexes, genders, sexualities,
races or social classes.
Xabier Arakistain, exhibition
curator.