Identity, Environment,Technology
Identity - case study (1)
MONA HATOUM
Hatoum was born in Beirut, to a Palestinian family. She attended Beirut University College from 1970 to 1972. She came to Britain as a student in the mid-1970s, settling in London in 1975 when civil war in the Lebanon made her return home impossible. She studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art from 1975 to 1979 and at the Slade School of Art from 1979 to 1981. Throughout the 1980s she held a number of artist's residencies in Britain, Canada and the United States. Hatoum has occupied part-time teaching positions in London, Maastricht, and Cardiff, where she was Senior Fellow at Cardiff Institute of Higher Education from 1989 to 1992, and in the mid-1990s she taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Hatoum's pieces are concerned with confrontational themes such as violence, oppression and voyeurism, often in reference to the human body. Conflict arises from the juxtaposition of opposites such as beauty and horror, desire and revulsion. Until 1988 Hatoum worked mainly with video and performance. Since 1989 she has concentrated on making installations, the first group of which were exhibited in 1992 at the Chapter Gallery, Cardiff. She has created a number of works using metal grids which allude to physical violence and imprisonment, notably Light Sentence (1992). She has also explored these themes in a number of smaller sculptures based on items of furniture, such as Incommunicado (1993, Tate Gallery T06988">T06988). She has had solo exhibitions at the Chapter Gallery, Cardiff (1992), the Arnolfini, Bristol (1993) and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1994), as well as at a number of venues across Canada. In 1995 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery. She lives in London.
Further reading:
Mona Hatoum, exhibition catalogue, Arnolfini, Bristol 1993
Virginia Button, The Turner Prize 1995, exhibition broadsheet, Tate Gallery, London 1995
Mona Hatoum, exhibition catalogue, Arnolfini, Bristol 1993
Virginia Button, The Turner Prize 1995, exhibition broadsheet, Tate Gallery, London 1995
Mona
Hatoum's complicated relationship to the domestic, is played out with reserved drama in Domestic Disturbance, an exhibition of 15 new works shown at MASS MoCA from March 17, 2001 through February 4, 2002. The sculptures, installation, and video were made during a residency at the Creux de l'Enfer, an exhibition space in an old knife factory in Thiers, France. The fact that these works were made in and for a former industrial space of the 19th century makes MASS MoCA - itself a former 19th-century factory complex - a uniquely apt American venue for the works.
Hatoum's complicated relationship to the domestic, is played out with reserved drama in Domestic Disturbance, an exhibition of 15 new works shown at MASS MoCA from March 17, 2001 through February 4, 2002. The sculptures, installation, and video were made during a residency at the Creux de l'Enfer, an exhibition space in an old knife factory in Thiers, France. The fact that these works were made in and for a former industrial space of the 19th century makes MASS MoCA - itself a former 19th-century factory complex - a uniquely apt American venue for the works.
This exhibition, organized by MASS MoCA with SITE Santa Fe, was the most comprehensive and extensive presentation of a single theme in Hatoum's work to date.
The focus of the Hatoum exhibition was a threatening, yet darkly comical, kitchen implement: La Grande Broyeuse (Mouli-Julienne x17), 1999 (image left). Hatoum based this massive black steel work on an old slicer, a hand-cranked precursor to the modern food processor, that she found in her mother's cupboard in Lebanon. La Grande Broyeuse's spindly legs and tail-like crank give it the appearance of gigantic creature, but its scale - sized for humans - is ominous indeed. For Hatoum, the instrument represents the domestic sphere, a sphere she presents at a confusing scale and full of potential violence.
No Way III (1996)
Mona Hatoum: Domestic Disturbance
Mar 17, 2001 - Feb 4, 2002
Galleries, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
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