Dirimart is pleased to announce 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 contemporary art, Amer opens a powerful visual field in which the female body and sexuality move beyond established social norms and systems of representation. Developed over several decades, her practice 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 of the male gaze, she presents women as strong and autonomous figures depicted in moments of pleasure, joy, and intimacy.
These figures, often playful and provocative, remain partially concealed beneath layers of thread, embroidered surfaces, and sculptural forms, inviting close engagement and discovery. 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 title, derived from Latin aurora (dawn) and also referring the ‘northern lights’, evokes a metaphor of emergence and transformation. Much like the gradual transition from darkness to light, the works move between visibility and concealment, control and chance. Highlights include the Paravent Girls series, in which painted female figures drawn from pornographic magazines are translated into bronze.
Functioning as paravents, these sculptures – the autonomous, joyful and empowered female figures – engage with themes of intimacy, visibility, and the relationship between public and private spaces. A separate body of work, Drawing in Space (developed in 2021), comprises sculptural silhouettes that create rhythm and spatial movement through the interplay of light and shadow. With these minimalist and abstract bronze forms, viewers are invited to reflect on the layered and shifting nature of women’s identities and experiences.
Bringing together Ghada Amer’s recent works across multiple media, Aurora will be on view at Dirimart Dolapdere from 9 April to 10 May 2026.
