• Ghada Amer

Le Salon Courbé

Francesca Minini is pleased to announce Ghada Amer show, Le Salon Courbé, a special project created for the gallery space and a collaborative work with Reza Farkhondeh, An indigestible Dessert.

Le Salon Courbé is a lounge, a comfortable place that can host the public and predispose it to a possible discussion. Here the artist would like compare two different cultures: the Middle Eastern and the Western one. The viewer can find many definitions of the word “terrorism” in English and in Arabic and he has to understand both languages in order to comprehend the gaps that those two defintions carry.
Ghada Amer uses crafts from Egypt such as carpet and furniture copying neo colonialist style and some crafts of Western taste like wallpaper. The wallpaper gathers the definition of the word terrorism in English since it has been created during the French revolution with the Reign of Terror. The 100 knot silk and wool handmade carpet carries the definition of the word terrorism in arabic. The same meaning is embroidered on a post colonial sofa using the old craft of the Middle East.
At the entrance there are some canvases where the definition of the words in Arabic such as love, peace, security and freedom is embroidered. Ghada Amer wants to remind herself and the viewer that Arabic, her first language, is not only associated with violence as the media are broadcasting nowadays.

The video An Indigestible Dessert, a collaboration between Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh is the video of a performance which took place in New York, in 2006, where the artists invited the audience to eat a dessert created in the effigy of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. An invitation to a carnivorous experience. Bon appetit!

The vision of Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh, both Middle Eastern, is an interesting starting point to reflect upon the tensions, the fears and the prejudices that often characterize the relation between the Middle Eastern and the Western culture.