ART-PRESENTATION: Mona Hatoum
Mona Hatoum’s work dialogues, in an original and exemplary manner, with the major disciplines and Movements of contemporary art: Performance, Video, Kinetic Art, Minimalism and Conceptual art. The strength of her work comes from the feeling it induces in viewers. She leaves them to navigate through an unstable universe, a world driven by contradictions and unfolding in different time frames, characterized by tensions. Mona Hatoum often places viewers at the heart of the work, engaging them in dialogue, sometimes putting them to the test.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Tate Modern Archive
Drawing on Mona’s Hatoum expansive career, the exhibition at the Tate Modern reflects 35 years of consistently poetic and radical thinking expressed through a diverse range of media. The exhibition present 100 works from her early performances and videos of the ‘80s to the present day. Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut in 1952, four years after her Palestinian parents had seen their own temporary stay in Lebanon turn permanent in May 1948 after the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war. Mona loved to draw and make things and was eager to study art, but her father was against it. During a visit to London in 1975, the civil war broke out in Lebanon and Hatoum was forced into exile. She stayed in London, and studied Art. Her first works were dramatic performances that alluded to her Palestinian origins and drew instant attention from the media and international curators. “Under Siege”, staged in 1982 (a year after she graduated) at the Aspex Gallery in Portsmouth , involved her repeatedly tripping inside a liquid-clay-smeared vertical chamber in an expression of personal turmoil, to the sound of revolutionary songs in Arabic and English recorded during London marches, and excerpts from Western news broadcasts. In the video “Roadworks” (1985), she documents a performance where she walked barefoot through the streets of Brixton with a pair of Dr. Marten boots tied to her ankles. The exhibition mixes works from all periods and disciplines, emphasizing her breadth. Items that seem harmless turn out to be menacing, such as a steel wheelchair with knife blades for push handles “Untitled (Wheelchair II)” (1999). In “Light Sentence” (1992) walls of industrial wire mesh lockers and a single moving lightbulb create dramatic shadows that transform the space into a disorientating and unstable place. Furniture and other familiar objects feature prominently, often modified and scaled up, to reveal the fine line between the familiar and the uncanny. “Home” (1999) is a kitchen table covered with shiny steel utensils, some of which occasionally light up and emit ominous crackling sounds. Her first map, “Present Tense” (1996, recreated in 2011), is made of 2,200 blocks of olive-oil soap from Nablus near Jerusalem, marking territories that would have been under Palestinian self-rule if the 1993 Oslo Accords had been implemented. Elsewhere, in “Natura morta (medical cabinet)” (2012), rows of delicate objects made of colored Murano glass turn out to be sculptures of hand grenades. Her installations also situate the body as subject to power or incarceration, evident in “Impenetrable” (2009), featuring a suspended square formed of hundreds of delicate rods of suspended barbed wire. The installation “Twelve Windows” (2012-13), consists of twelve pieces of embroidery made by Palestinian women living in refugee camps in Lebanon, embroidery becomes an act of resistance. Organised and produced by Inaash, a Lebanese NGO, these delicately embroidered “windows” are suspended on crisscrossing steel cables, each one representing a key region of Palestine through their unique motifs, stitches, colors and patterns.
Info: Tate Modern, Bankside, London, Duration 4/5-21/8/16, Days & Hours: Sun-Thu 10:00-18:00, Fri-Sat 10:00-22:00, www.tate.org.uk
