Mona Hatoum in Berlin and the sensitive corpus of her work
DS.WRITER:
Tasos Giannakopoulos
Image: Light Sentence | jungle-magazine.co.uk
A chance to talk about Mona Hatoum. The Georg Kolbe Museum, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Georg Kolbe Museum and KINDL – Center for Contemporary Art, all based in Berlin, all hold exhibitions and installations of her work. The institute mentioned first, explores through the works of Hatoum -which of course encourage such explorations- ideas about the home, structural violence as well as other humanitarian issues. A series of sculptural installations is presented at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, including the magnificent Remains of the Day (2016-18) as well as new site-specific works. The site-specificity of the installation takes advantage of the old brewing factory at KINDL, specifically the room where the beer was boiled, where we can perceive an engagement with issues regarding our present societal reality, which is currently, respectively, turbulent and at a boiling point.
Mona Hatoum | wikimedia.org
Mona Hatoum was born in 1952 in Beirut, Lebanon to Palestinian parents. As she mentions, her family is part of those Palestinians who became exiles in Lebanon in 1948 and were not given Lebanese citizenship in order to discourage their integration. (BOMB Magazine with Janine Antoni, 1998)
Obviously, the subject of her origins is evident in her work but like all the good ones, she overcomes it and builds something that is greater than simply that. As for the rest of her background, she studied graphic design at the University of Beirut and later trained at the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she now resides following the events of the 1975 Lebanese Civil War. For a while, she also worked in the field of advertising but it didn’t sustain her devotion.
Light Sentence | valledesign.be
Architecture and design play an important part -regarding their rendering- in Hatoum’s general body of work as well as in the objects, sculptures, installations and situations that will be exhibited in cultural spaces in the city of Berlin. An illuminating example is Light Sentence (1992), where a motorized lamp moves within a metal grid, altering and dynamically shaping the space through the opposite of light, the shadow. The space and objects, along with the title’s pun, open a path to interpretations concerning our body’s relation to borders that may sometimes be cages and other times the material that -through its interaction with light- reveals the shadows and shakes our general inner and outer environment.
Light Sentence | elconfidencial.com
Respectively, her work Remains (2018) continues to explore the function of the metal frame but on another scale, that of furniture. The grid takes the form of a typical, familiar chair that could be part of our own living room and within the grid, fragments of wood akin to coal residue are entrapped. There, she succeeds in defamiliarizing the object, an action capable of generating thought both concerning climate change -like an echo of her work Hot Spot (2009)- as well as matter and perhaps even more intangible, invisible facets of reality, which can be projected on such a daily object. With a simple transformation, she achieves the peculiar status of the uncanny as in a horror movie where the archetypal pitched roof house has creaking doors or special guests in the attic or basement. "Minor" modifications in material and form evoke associations around the ways in which we can use such a fragile object, but also in relation to what kinds of things they imprison or are imprisoned within it.
Hot Spot | theoriginalneon-neon.com
Remains | artbasel.com
Her work Grater Divide (2002) poses a similar struggle with limits. A folding screen that can be found in a hospital or a changing room is transformed into a grate. The double transformation -both of the identity of the object and its materiality and permeability- brings the body to the centre of things, just like her most important work, Deep throat (1996), where she presented the inner landscape of her body through an endoscope. In Grater Divide, a screen divider triggers a dialogue about the nature of limits and borders, recalling her Palestinian origins. Its holes are reminiscent of the Arabic mashrabiya and their typical use in women's boudoirs directs an even broader conversation. Do dividers, after all, conceal and protect our bodies and our secret moments, or do they have the sharp effect of a metal scraper? Mona Hatoum opens these roads to us and constantly invites us to walk them.
