Mona Hatoum. Uncanny Objects

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