Artist: Ghada Amer

Dirimart presents Aurora, Ghada Amer’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, seventeen years after her previous Istanbul show. Bringing together a selection of her recent bronze sculptures, iconic embroidered paintings, a new series of canvases that highlight appliqué techniques, and paintings on wood, the exhibition offers an overview of Amer’s recent practice.

By repositioning traditional techniques such as sewing and embroidery – historically coded as ‘women’s work’ – within the language of contemporary art, Amer opens a powerful visual field in which the female body and sexuality move beyond established social norms and systems of representation. Throughout a practice developed over several decades, the artist raises questions around gender politics, desire, representation, and the visibility of the female subject in art history.

Amer’s work often begins with sexualised images drawn from pornographic magazines, which she reinterprets through processes of stitching, layering, and painterly intervention. Subverting conventions imposed by the male gaze, she imagines women as strong and autonomous figures depicted in moments of pleasure, joy, and intimacy. Appearing alone or in interaction with one another, these figures are frequently playful and provocative, yet remain partially concealed beneath layers of thread, embroidered surfaces, and sculptural forms. The viewer is invited to engage closely with the works, allowing the images to gradually emerge through a process of visual and sensory attention. Through this layered structure, Amer’s practice foregrounds the complex relationships between power, freedom, and women’s lived experience.

Bringing together works across different media, Aurora offers a renewed perspective on the critical and poetic visual language Amer has developed around the female body, sexuality, and freedom. The exhibition takes its title from the Latin word aurora, meaning ‘dawn’. It refers also to the ‘northern lights’ and thus evokes a metaphor of emergence and transformation. Much like the gradual transition from darkness to light at daybreak, Amer’s works move between visibility and concealment, control and chance, creating a unique space in which images appear, dissolve, and arise again.

In her paintings, Amer transforms embroidery, a technique traditionally confined to the domestic sphere, into the expansive and public space of the canvas. Allowing the thread to behave according to its own material logic, the artist combines gestural movement with the fluidity of paint, producing a layered and tactile visual language. Threads that fall, knot, and cascade create shifting relationships between figure, colour, and texture. Hanging threads evoke the vertical light formations of an aurora, generating a sense of atmospheric depth while suggesting the moment at which a feminine image emerges from beneath layers of social constraint.

The Paravent Girls series comprises monumental sculptures in which Amer translates her painted female figures into bronze. Images drawn from pornographic magazines are transformed in the artist’s hands into autonomous, joyful, and empowered female figures and the works bring together the intimacy of everyday life with themes of power, freedom, and visibility. While the sculptures function as paravents, used to divide a room, distinguish between public and private spaces, or create a sense of mystery, Amer’s figures are continuously revealed to the viewer, captured in moments of intimacy and eroticism. Reinterpreted through cardboard surfaces, the works are cast in bronze, combining the material’s permanence with the artist’s tactile, gestural approach. The reliefs on the surfaces retain visible traces of handwork. These sculptures embody the emergence of suppressed female identity and desire, materialising ephemeral, flowing moments like an aurora into lasting bronze form. They invite the viewer to reconsider the relationship between gaze, power, and visibility.

In her sculptural silhouettes, which Amer refers to as Drawing in Space (developed in 2021), silhouettes derived from pornographic magazines move beyond anonymity to become figures that have long occupied the artist’s imagination. Offering a female presence that appears both familiar and newly discovered, these sculptures create rhythm and spatial movement through the interplay of light and shadow. With their minimalist and abstract character, the figures appear as transient presences within space, emerging or disappearing according to the viewer’s perspective, much like the subtle shifts of light at dawn. Echoing the cascading threads of Amer’s canvases, the bronze forms appear to hang and unfold in space, establishing a rhythmic balance between visibility and concealment, control and chance. Each silhouette engages the viewer in an encounter that reflects the layered and shifting nature of women’s identities and experiences.