Tag: space

MONA HATOUM, DEEP THROAT, 1996

“Mona Hatoum began her artistic career using performance and video in the 80’s, focusing with great intensity on the idea of ​​the body and performance action. From the beginning of the 1990s, her artistic work was developed through large-scale installations that aim to engage the viewer in the contradictory emotions of desire and repulsion, fear and fascination. In her sculptural installations, Mona Hatoum has used the resource of the transformation of the familiar and the everyday (household objects such as chairs, tables, kitchen utensils, etc.) into something strange, threatening and dangerous. Even the human body becomes unusual in works like Corps étranger (1994) or Deep Throat (1996), installations using endoscopic paths through the “interior landscape” of the artist’s own body. In Homebound (2000) and Sous Tension (1999) Hatoum uses a somewhat surreal and threatening domestic dramatization, to catch the viewer in their perceptual and corporal journey through the space of the installation. The evolution of the artistic work of Hatoum lies in the spatial extension of the body within its limits, borders and spaces of collision, creating installations with an emphasis on the spatial construction caused by the effect of the displacement and the movements of the body in them. A body which in turn is the personal element of her autobiography and the material with which it identifies, the subaltern and the cartographic exile of her own autobiography, her status as a female Palestinian artist.

The ability to recreate and question cultural and political geographic spaces has become an invariable in her work, from the personal condition of exile and the reference to transportation and new ways of relating spatially, objectively and culturally in the passage, transition and movement of the body, giving a broad perspective of a body located between the interstitial of the artistic performance. Exodus, displacement, and instability are inescapable concepts in the life and work of Hatoum, and according to Kimberly Lamm, “the only real consistency in Hatoum’s work is her destabilization of ‘home’” (Lamm, 2004: 2)….The installations and sculptural objects of Mona Hatoum are defined based on spatiality, the measurement and the displacement of the body, and are impregnated by a sense of dislocation and disorientation, which leans towards the grotesque. Hatoum frequently redeems the uprooting of familiar and strange places, which occurs in the displacement, in the exile and through the body and their affects. They become a dislocation of memory. The fears and defamiliarizations of transit spaces and unearthed everyday objects, irreconcilable with their basic function they are transformed into something different, something unstable and precarious as in her work Present Tense (1996). The materials used in her installations such as hair, nails, stains, blood, etc., remind us of the relation between the body and the performativity of space; since her work is associated with the fabric of space and the body. And is directly linked to her own condition of nomadism, passage and transit between three territorial political entities, Palestine, Lebanon and Great Britain. But it is not only her status as an exiled Palestinian woman, which has repercussions on her work. Her work is developed challenging the stereotypes of reality, as she says: “In a very general sense I want to create a situation where reality itself becomes a questionable point (…) A kind of self-examination and an examination of the power structures that control us”

—Toni Mulet