Mona Hatoum (born 1952 in Beirut, Lebanon) is a video artist and installation artist of Palestinian origin, who lives in London. Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, Lebanon to Palestinian parents in 1952. Although born in Lebanon, Hatoum does not identify as Lebanese. âAlthough I was born in Lebanon, my family is Palestinian. And like the majority of Palestinians who became exiles in Lebanon after 1948, they were never able to obtain Lebanese identity cards.â[1]
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As she grew up, her family did not support her desire to pursue art. âWhen I was a teenager and we were discussing my future and I mentioned that I wanted to become an artist he (her father) categorically refused to send me to art school, because he said he wanted me to do something that will get me a real job, and that was the end of the conversation.â[2] She continued to draw throughout her childhood, though, illustrating her work from poetry or science class. âI remember that I used to spend a lot of time actually perfecting these drawings, and I felt extremely encouraged when on one occasion for instance the teacher showed one of my drawings to the whole class and said this is a masterpiece. So I mean that's the, all the encouragement I got as a child towards you know becoming an artist.â[3]
In an attempt to settle with her father, Hatoum attended the Beirut University College in Lebanon to study graphic design. âI went to graphic arts school] as a compromise to be able to go to university and study some kind of career related to art, but obviously it wasn't art. It was a way of doing something that would get me a job as soon as I left university, and it was only a two year course so it meant that I could get out of my father's grip or whatever within two years, so I did two years of graphic design.â[4] After obtaining her degree, Hatoum began working with an advertising agency. Hatoum was displeased with the work she was producing while working in advertising. âI was like always on the wrong side of the fence...because I was always pointing out that the adverts were not honestâŠthat they were claiming certain things about the products which were not there... I wasn't part of that conspiracy against the consumer if you like...it gave me internal conflict to work in this kind of situation.â[5]
During a visit to London in 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon and Hatoum was forced into exile. She stayed in London, training at both the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art (University College, London) between the years 1975 and 1981.
Mona Hatoum explores a variety of different subject matter via different theoretical frameworks. Her work can be interpreted as a description of the body, as a commentary on politics, and on gender and difference as she explores the dangers and confines of the domestic world.[6] Her work can also be interpreted through the concept of space as her sculpture and installation work depend on the viewer to inhabit the surrounding space to complete the effect. There are always multiple readings to her work. [7] âI wanted it to appeal to your senses first maybe or to somehow affect you in a bodily way and then the sort of connotations and concepts that are behind that work can come out of that original physical experience.â[8] The physical responses that Hatoum desired in order to provoke psychological and emotional responses ensures unique and individual reactions from different viewers. [9]
Hatoumâs early work consisted largely of performance pieces that used a direct physical confrontation with an audience to make a political point. She used this technique as a means of making a direct statement using her own body; the performances often referenced her background and the political situation in Palestine.[10] In her work, she addressed the vulnerability of the individual in relation to the violence inherent in institutional power structures. Her primary point of reference was the human body, sometimes using her own body. [11] She says of her focus on the body: âI wanted to make I wanted it to appeal to your senses first maybe or to somehow affect you in a bodily way and then the sort of connotations and concepts that are behind that work can come out of that original physical experience. This is what I was aiming at in the work. I wanted it to be experienced through the body. In other words I want work to be both experienced sensually and intellectually rather than just one dimensionally if you like.â [12] One of her first major pieces, Measures of Distance, explores the themes topics of her early art. âI made a conscious decision to delve into the personal â however complex, confused, and contradictory the material I was dealing with was⊠Once I made the work I found that it spoke of the complexities of exile, displacement, the sense of loss and separation caused by war. In other words, it contextualized the image, or this person, âmy mother,â within a social-political context.â [13]
In the late eighties, Hatoum abandoned performances as politically too direct and turned her attention instead to installations and objects, taking up some of the earlier ideas from her student days at the Slade School of Art in London.[14] âI donât think art is the best place to be didactic; I donât think the language of visual art is the most suitable for presenting clear arguments, let alone for trying to convince, convert or teach.â[15] From then on, she relied on the kind of interactivity that lets the spectator become involved in the aesthetic experience without the presence of the artist herself as performer making her the focus of attention.[16] âIn the early performance work I was in a sense demonstrating or delivering a message to the viewer. With the installation work, I wanted to implicate the viewer in a phenomenological situation where the experience is more physical and direct. I wanted the visual aspect of the work to engage the viewer in a physical, sensual, maybe even emotional way; the associations and search for meaning come after that.â[17] Her work from the 1990s onwards made the shift from making statements to asking questions. Much more is required of the viewer as performances were replaced by sculptures and installations that required a level of mental and physical interactivity with the viewer. [18]
âI was completely taken in by Minimal and Conceptual Art when I was on my first degree course. Going to University afterwards, which was my first encounter with a large bureaucratic institution, I became involved in analyzing power structures, first in relation to feminism, and then in wider terms as in the relationship between the Third World and the West. This led me to making confrontational issue-based performance works which were fuelled by anger and a sense of urgency. Later, when I got into the area of installation and object making, I wouldn't say I went back to a minimal aesthetic as such, it was more a kind of reductive approach.â [19]
âWhen I went to London in 1975 for what was meant to be a brief visit, I got stranded there because the war broke out in Lebanon, and that [a] kind of dislocation. How that manifests itself in my work is as a sense of disjunction. For instance, in a work like Light Sentence, the movement of the light bulb causes the shadows of the wire mesh lockers to be in perpetual motion, which creates a very unsettling feeling. When you enter the space you have the impression that the whole room is swaying and you have the disturbing feeling that the ground is shifting under your feet. This is an environment in constant flux â no single point of view, no solid frame of reference. There is a sense of instability and restlessness in the work. This is the way in which the work is informed by my background.â[20]
Many of Hatoumâs early pieces situate the body as the locus of a network of concernsâpolitical, feminist, and linguisticâthereby eliciting a highly visceral response.[21] âIt was more a kind of reaction to this kind of feeling that people were so disembodied around me, people were just like walking intellects and not really giving any attention to the body and the fact that this is part of one's existence.â [22]
The political possibilities for the uncanny visual motif are relevant to discussions of Hatoumâs work, as the disruption achieved at a psychological level can have broad implications involving power, politics, or individual concerns.[23] The allusiveness attained by her work is not always referencing grand political events, or appealing to a generalized cultural consciousness, but instead to a seemingly unattainable threat that is only possible to address on an individual scale.[24]
Since 1983, Mona Hatoum has been displaying both her installations and her video performance art pieces on exhibitions around the world. She has been featured in individual exhibitions as recently as 2011 in White Cube in London.
Some of her other solo exhibitions to note include: Centre Pompidou, Paris (1994), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1997), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1998), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (1999), Tate Britain, London (2000), Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Magasin 3, Stockholm (2004) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2005), Parasol Unit, London (2008), Darat Al Funun, Jordan (2008) and Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2009).
She has also participated in a number of recognized group exhibitions, including: The Turner Prize (1995), Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005) and Biennale of Sydney (2006).
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Michael Archer, Phaidon Archer, M. Brett, G. De Zegher, C. ed., Mona Hatoum, Phaidon, Oxford, 1997
âI'm often asked the same question: What in your work comes from your own culture? As if I have a recipe and I can actually isolate the Arab ingredient, the woman ingredient, the Palestinian ingredient. People often expect tidy definitions of otherness, as if identity is something fixed and easily definable.â [25]
âI want the work in the first instance to have a strong formal presence, and through the physical experience to activate a psychological and emotional response. In a very general sense I want to create a situation where reality itself becomes a questionable point. Where one has to reassess their assumptions and their relationship to things around them. A kind of self-examination and an examination of the power structures that control us: Am I the jailed or the jailer? The oppressed or the oppressor? Or both. I want the work to complicate these positions and offer an ambiguity and ambivalence rather than concrete and sure answers.â [26]
âI want the meaning to be imbedded, so to speak, in the material that I'm using. I choose the material as an extension of the concept or sometimes in opposition to it, to create a contradictory and paradoxical situation of attraction/repulsion, fascination and revulsion. For instance, I intentionally used a very sensuous, translucent silicon rubber to make the Entrails Carpet. You want to walk all over it with bare feet. On the other hand, when you recognize the pattern on the surface of the carpet, you realize itâs something very repulsive, it looks like entrails splayed out all over the floor as if it's the aftermath of a massacre. There's a kind of attraction/repulsion operating here.â [27]
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2006): 24-25 Scharrer, Eva. âCriticsâ Picks: Mona Hatoum at Max Hetzler.â artforum.com <http://www.artforum.com/index.php?pn=picks&place=Berlin#picks11022> Spears, Dorothy. âEvidence if a Life Lived.â Art on Paper (January/February 2006): 64-69
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(June 3, 2001): AR33, AR35 2000 Halliburton, Rachel. âThe appliance of science.â The Independent (London) (March 22, 2000): 10 1999
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