ART-PREVIEW:Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum creates discomforting, challenging work that reveals the contradictions and uncertainties of our complex, confounding world. Using domestic and other familiar objects, Hatoum creates installations and sculptures that may simultaneously evoke fear and fascination, or beauty and revulsion, and that could hardly be more pertinent to our era of global migration and political uncertainty.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Chantal Crousel Archive

New sculptures, installations and works on paper are on presentation in Mona Hatoum’s solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris. Pursuing her  reflection on  global conflict, displacement and surveillance, Mona Hatoum handles  in this new corpus of works  a wide range of materials such as steel,  brick, concrete  and  human hair, in order to create areas of tension, paradox and ambiguity. The grid’s motif and  spherical  shape are used as metaphors for confinement, oppression and destruction. The artist’s works often catch the visitor’s eye only to then push it away.  Tinged with humour, her practice teases our knowledge on Minimalism or Surrealism, subsequently creating  antagonistic emotions that uphold the strength of her work. In the new sculpture “Hot Spot (stand)” (2018), a metal globe on a 50s-style stand has its landmass delineated in glowing, bright red neon. Emitting a palpable warmth and an audible electrical buzz, it constantly flickers, suggesting a world that is dangerous, heating up and entirely caught up in violent conflict. Likewise, in another new sculpture, the artist uses rebar – steel bars­ that reinforce concrete building structures – to create the form of a globe, placed on the floor and tilted at a similar angle to the earth. Along its meridian lines are various irregularly formed pieces of rubble, like a series of planets rotating in orbit. By transforming the forlorn material leftovers from war (lumps of aggregate concrete and bent strips of rebar are often the most visible elements in areas of urban destruction), the work suggests beauty amid chaos and the possibility for repair and reconstruction. The nature of the materials Hatoum employs to create her works is equally as significant and symbolic in conveying her ideology. “Orbital II” (2018) an earth like sphere constructed from rebar – steel bars often most visible in areas struck by urban destruction, also features pieces of rubble, giving the appearance of planets orbiting in space. Mona Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon in 1952 and has lived in London since 1975. She first became widely known in the mid 1980s for a series of performance and video works that focused with great intensity on the body. In the 1990s her work moved increasingly towards large-scale installations and sculptures that aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. Hatoum has developed a language in which familiar, domestic everyday objects are often transformed into foreign, threatening and dangerous things. Even the human body is rendered unfamiliar in “Corps étranger” (1994), a video installation that displays an endoscopic journey through the interior landscape of her own body. “Homebound” (2000) is an assemblage of household furniture wired up with an audibly active electric current that combines a sense of threat with a surrealist sense of humour. In “Hot Spot” (2006) and “Map (clear)” (2015) Hatoum uses cartography to explore instability and precariousness in today’s political landscape.

Info: Galerie Chantal Crousel, 10 rue Charlot, Paris, Duration: 12/1-23/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.crousel.com