Mona Hatoum
About the Exhibition
Mona Hatoum is a Palestinian artist living and working in London who has generated excitement in the art world with her videos and installations. The MCA-organized exhibition Mona Hatoum was the first major American museum presentation of the artist’s work. It premiered at the MCA from July 19 to September 14, 1997, before beginning a national tour. Providing a survey of Hatoum’s work from the last 15 years, the exhibition concentrated on her more recent production of installations, sculpture, and photographic works. In addition, three video works by Hatoum that were acquired recently by the MCA (the artist’s first objects to enter the permanent collection) were presented in the museum’s video gallery. Featured were approximately 30 works in total, most of which have never before been exhibited in the United States.
"Mona Hatoum is a major international artist who until now has not received a major museum show in the United States," said MCA Curatorial Assistant Jessica Morgan, who organized the exhibition. "Inspired as much by her exile from war-torn Beirut as by her sensitivity to contemporary racial and gender issues, Hatoum's works are both deeply personal and quietly political. Without being didactic, she invites viewers to see the world through her eyes while also encouraging them to trust their own reactions to her evocative works."
Hatoum’s recent work includes the remarkable video installation Corps étranger (1994), produced with the assistance of a surgeon. The video maps an internal and external self-portrait of the artist through such complex medical procedures as endoscopy, colonoscopy, and echography. The video is projected on the floor within a circular booth and is accompanied by the sound of the artist’s heartbeat. The equally dramatic installation Light Sentence (1992) is a dark, cell-like room enclosed on three sides with wire mesh. Hanging from the ceiling is a single light bulb, which is continually lowered and raised, creating disorienting shadows on the wall. The effect of the piece is alternately vertiginous, frightening, and eerily beautiful.
In addition to these two installations, the exhibition featured a series of large sculptures exploring an oft-repeated form in Hatoum’s sculptural work: the bed or cot. Quarters (1996) consists of four metal beds stacked in a cruciform arrangement. Divan Bed (1996) is a coffin-like metal mattress. Incommunicado (1993) is one of a series of metal, rubber, and glass cots rendered useless because they lack the framework necessary to support a mattress. In all these works, the notion of a bed being a place of rest is replaced by an enigmatic object which is suggestive of physical discomfort, restraint, or even torture.
Another major sculptural work included in the exhibition was Socle du Monde (1991-92), an homage to Piero Manzoni, whose work of the same title was itself dedicated to Galileo. The piece consists of a large metal cube covered with metal filings which cling to magnets on the surface of the cube. The magnetic attraction and repulsion forces the filings into a convoluted, intestine-shaped pattern suggestive of a teeming organism. Related to this work are two recent carpet pieces which play off associations with their domestic counterparts as well as Islamic prayer rugs. Entrails Carpet (1995) is an opalescent rubber mat cast in a similar intestinal pattern as that of Socle du Monde. Pin Carpet (1995) is a veritable bed of nails. Both works were placed on the floor so that they resemble an actual carpet.
Three single-channel videos by Hatoum were available for viewing in the MCA’s video gallery. In one of these, Measures of Distance (1988), Hatoum confronts the political and emotional ramifications of her exiled status. The video includes images of her mother in the family home in Beirut and a voice-over of the artist reading personal letters from and to her mother. The exhibition also included a group of smaller sculptures, a selection of drawings, and a series of photographs taken earlier this year in Israel, Paris, and the West Indies.
Connections can be drawn between Hatoum’s work and that of Manzoni, one of the early figures of European conceptual art. Associations also can be made to the confrontational work of such arte povera artists as Jannis Kounellis and the concerns of figures associated with anti-form, such as Eva Hesse and Richard Serra.
Biography
Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1952. She has lived in England since the outbreak of civil war in Beirut in 1975. After graduating from the Slade School of Art in 1981, Hatoum embarked on a career as a performance artist. Since the mid-1980s, however, she has concentrated on the production of installations, videos, sculpture, and, most recently, photography.
Hatoum has exhibited internationally. Her important one-person shows include the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in 1993, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1994, the Tate Gallery in London in 1995, and the current MCA-organized, U.S. touring exhibition. She was invited to show her work in the prestigious Venice Biennial in 1995, and she has exhibited in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montreal, to name just a few.
In addition to the MCA permanent collection, Hatoum’s work is represented in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.