Recent Exhibitions:Mona Hatoum: Present-Tense
Foundation for Contemporary Art, London
Mona Hatoum is the youngest daughter of Palestinian Arab exiles from Haifa. Her parent’s story is just one thread in the warp and weft of more than 70,000 others stories that fled Haifa along with their tellers during the 1948 bombardment by the Israeli Defense Force, the aftermath of which left the city ‘a corpse’ in the words of Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion. The atrocities that affected her parents are at the core of Hatoum’s own working identity. She later experienced another physical and cultural exile from her family when she left Lebanon to pursue her education in Fine Art in London.
The theme of exile is one that has been dealt with in complex ways by many artists in recent times. It has excitement and relevance for the modern audience as it hones into and gives physical expression to the often intangible, unspoken, yet shared sense of dislocation and alienation in society and the world at large. It is a theme capable of broaching and dissolving false notions of separatism between the personal and political, and this is of major significance to what is often called the post emotional society.
Hatoum’s work is varied yet militantly consistent. At times it is a-temporal, at others it is painfully nostalgic for the irretrievable- the empty space from which she was ejected as an infant quickly sealed itself behind her, preventing any hope of re-entrance. Whilst specific political agendas do surface in Hatoum’s work, they slide out of focus again, as the cultural motifs that form her visual vocabulary mingle with deep sensory memories and re-emerge as manufactured fetishes of her own subconscious. The juxtaposition of repellent objects and materials index the schisms within her identity. Hatoum has described her own work as a self-created 'dialect' composed as an amalgam of body language and the language of art. She envisages her predicament and personality as hybridised and shifting yet simultaneously dictated, and delineated by the society in which she now resides.
'Living in the West as a person from the Third World...I was aware of being an outsider, relegated to a marginal position, of being defined as 'Other', or as one of 'Them'.
Struggling for a form of expression complex enough to match her predicament, and yet finding herself shored up on polarised strands, Hatoum began to pioneer a more fruitful course in which she challenged the violence attributed to the terrorist body and by extension, to her own body, in it's accusative, social sense. She did this by studying her own flesh and contrasting the vulnerability of her immediate body to the preconceptions and expectations which society had imposed upon it. This is most visible in performance works such as The Negotiating Table, 1982, and video pieces such as Corps etranger, 1994, where she explores, intrudes upon and presents her body, offering it up to the scrutinising medical gaze. In doing so she manipulates the viewers’ sense of scopophilia and visceral aversion and also reveals the invisible lines that distinguish the intimate from the strange.
Through finding a way to express with her body whilst maintaining its sculptural integrity, Hatoum re-discovered the vast potentials for sculpture that lay outside of her, in the ‘world of things’. Eschewing the minimalist dogma which rejected the possibility of emotion in favor of pure form, her objects cast a statuesque solemnity in situ. One example of this is the light sculpture Undercurrent, 2004 from her most recent exhibition.
The materialism of her current work can be thought of as a comment on how objects act as consolations for loss and trauma. This is redolent of Muensterburger’s psychoanalytic insights into the collector’s impulse. Sexuality, repression, childhood, violence, lucidity and dreaming follow each-other in closed circles. Innocuous groans, changes in light, and shadows on walls interact to create an overall sense of disorientation and the uncanny. The unheimlich and ‘unsettledness’ that Hatoum describes as a constant feature of second generation trauma. Where childhood is transformed into a disturbing contrivance of shadow and light that whirls carousel-like in a small room off to the side of the main exhibition space Misbah, 2006. Warfare is a tiny self contained cyclone crouching low and undisturbed waiting for the unsuspecting passerby, who will inevitably walk away detached and unscathed, Round and Round, 2007. The title of this exhibition indicates Hatoum's attempts to resituate herself in the Present Tense away from the terriying episodic visions of Dar Yassin and the bombardment of Haifa, that haunted her throughout childhood, and which her lifes work has been an effort to understand.
Present Tense was a site specific work installed at the Anadiel Gallery in Jerusalem. the title of Hatoum's first exhibition in what was once her homeland. As familiar objects become unfamiliar, instability and alienation result disintegrating one's sense of self. It is significant that this small gallery located within the old walls of the city was the sight that inspired her first sculptural use of Nablus soap, once a thriving commodity of considerable reputation for it's use of traditional time-honoured manufacture techniques. Hatoum's soap is unusable and unfamiliar. Hundreds of squares of soap are wasted with the thousands upon thousands of little red droplets that Hatoum has imprinted into them. Each one represents a Palestinian village or territory granted self-rule by Oslo II, the failed Israeli-Palestinian agreement backed by Clinton in 1995.
Upstairs another of Hatoum’s non-body works, a major kinetic piece
Mobile Home II, 2006, reminiscent of her earlier crib sculptures, hums in the parasol unit’s large light filled space, emphasising the absence of people. Exotic domestic objects hang as familiar articles along wire rows strewn up across an empty bed frame. Single bird cages and dented utensils evoke lost cultures and everyday patterns of existence, whilst small worn suitcases conjure images of the refugee or first generation immigrant whose worldly possessions whittle down to what they can carry, lending them poignancy. These objects plod past each other in separate orbits, inarticulate, uncertain, and graceful.
Mona Hatoum at Parasol Unit, 14 Wharf Road, N1, until August 8
