Since my early performances, the body has been central to my work. Even before that I was making small works on paper using bodily fluids and body rejects as materials. I have always been dissatisfied with work that just appeals to your intellect . . . the body is the axis of our perceptions, so how can art afford not to take that as a starting point?
Mona Hatoum, in “Michael Archer in Conversation with Mona Hatoum,” in Mona Hatoum (London: Phaidon, 1997), 8.
Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, where her Palestinian parents settled after being exiled during the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. In 1975, while on a short trip to London, the Lebanese Civil War broke out and prevented her return home. She remained in London, and between 1975 and 1981 she studied art at Byam Shaw School of Art and Slade School of Fine Art.1 “The Slade politicized me,” said the artist. “I got involved in feminist groups . . . started examining power structures and trying to understand why I felt so ‘out of place.’”2 Ideas around instability and displacement appeared early in Hatoum’s experimental, even dangerous work, like running 240 volts of electricity through a circuit of metal household objects, and she began making temporary performance works too hazardous for galleries. In Variation on Discord and Divisions (1984), the artist crawled onto a stage covered in sheets of newspaper to scrub the floor with a bucket of red-stained water. In a series of vignettes, she cuts holes through an opaque hood masking her face with a knife; sets a dining table and pulls raw kidney from under her clothes, cutting it up and serving it to the audience on plates, and later projected slides of newspaper articles reading “35,000 people have been the victims of death squads since 1980. 1,500 people have been butchered in cold blood in Nazi-like fashion. . . . Twin refugee camps. . . Oppressed people. Famine worse than ever.” Like the sculptural work that followed, the scene was deeply sinister and placed the body in a vulnerable relationship with the home and the state—with cultural, historical, and economic forces.
The body is central to Mona Hatoum’s work. While in early performances and works she used her own body—for example, her billboard Over my Dead Body (1988) features the artist’s profile, a tiny toy soldier positioned on her nose to point his gun at her temple—her installation works implicate the viewer in a physical experience. The gigantic scale of her sculptures induce a kind of Alice in Wonderland effect,1 overwhelming the viewer’s space, while sleek materials like marble and glass seduce. “You first experience an artwork physically,” says the artist.2 Meanings and associations emerge as the form of an oversized metal grater comes to resemble a bed, for example, or the fragility of glass playground swings pose potential destruction. Hatoum’s intention “to create a situation where reality itself becomes a questionable point”3 manifests in physical sensations.
Sheena Wagstaff, “Uncharted Territory: New Perspectives in the Art of Mona Hatoum,” in Mona Hatoum: The Entire World as a Foreign Land (London: Tate Gallery, 2000), 27. ↩︎
Sheena Wagstaff, “Uncharted Territory: New Perspectives in the Art of Mona Hatoum,” in Mona Hatoum: The Entire World as a Foreign Land (London: Tate Gallery, 2000), 28. ↩︎
Mona Hatoum, interview with Janine Antoni, BOMB, no. 63 (Spring 1998), available at bombmagazine.org/articles/mona-hatoum/. ↩︎
Household objects such as kitchen utensils, a child’s crib, and soap appear in the sculptures and installations of Mona Hatoum. Though the artist draws on familiar objects and materials suggestive of domesticity, instead of evoking comfort they present bodily threat. A crib’s protective guardrails resemble prison bars, and a rotary vegetable shredder—a device she remembers from her mother’s kitchen in Beirut—enlarged twenty-one times its original size is big enough to hold, or shred, a human body. These uncanny objects—familiar turned disturbing—evoke a complicated relationship with the notion of home. Straddling a line between domesticity and entrapment, they relate to ideas of femininity, which traditionally confine women to the home, and of exile, in which a sense of home is unstable. As cultural critic Edward Said writes in “Reflections on Exile” (1984, a seminal text for Hatoum), “Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons.”1
Edward Said, quoted in Sheena Wagstaff, “Uncharted Territory: New Perspectives in the Art of Mona Hatoum,” in Mona Hatoum: The Entire World as a Foreign Land (London: Tate Gallery, 2000), 36. ↩︎
Mona Hatoum resists filtering her work through the facts of her origin story. Though her studio is in London, she is a kind of transnational artist who makes work around the world. She is attracted to the contexts and materials of a specific place like “the local street market, a snippet of conversation, a certain local material or local craft,” so her materials are varied, and her practice defies a certain stability.1 Hatoum created Drowning Sorrows (2001–02) during a residency in Caracas, Venezuela. She collected the flask-like glass bottles of locally made liquor, cut them at various angles, and arranged them in a circular pattern on the floor.2 The bottles appear as if they are floating or bobbing in water, suggestive of a liquid floor—as though the bottom has truly fallen out.
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