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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  EYE SPY: Barbs and wires
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EYE SPY: Barbs and wires

Artist Mona Hatoum's work has captured the Palestinian experience brutally yet beautifully

Palestinian-born artist Mona Hatoum’s work is a sharp reminder of the universalizing force of art, its capacity to articulate a collective struggle even when it remains intensely embedded in personal histories. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsPremium
Palestinian-born artist Mona Hatoum’s work is a sharp reminder of the universalizing force of art, its capacity to articulate a collective struggle even when it remains intensely embedded in personal histories. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

If you have been following the latest series of attacks on Gaza by the Israeli forces, you may find it hard to forget the harrowing photographs that accompany the reports. These images of bloodied bodies and buildings reduced to rubble may relate to specific instances of atrocity perpetrated in the region, though such documents also resonate beyond time and geography, evoking loss, grief, terror, and pity among people and in places far removed from their immediate context.

It is art though that can dare speak on behalf of many, using its symbolic capital to tell stories over which no one nation or community has a monopoly. In the current circumstances, Palestinian-born artist Mona Hatoum’s work is a sharp reminder of the universalizing force of art, its capacity to articulate a collective struggle even when it remains intensely embedded in personal histories.

Born in 1952, of parents who were forced to live in exile in Lebanon in 1948 after the conflict started in Palestine, Hatoum moved to Britain in her 20s by sheer accident. She was on holiday in London in 1975 when the Lebanese civil war broke out, making it impossible for her to go back home. Since her father had the foresight to secure British passports for the entire family through his employment at the British embassy in Lebanon, Hatoum could stay on in England, where she went on to study at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Having trained as a graphic designer in the hope of better chances of employment, she spent five years working in the advertising industry. But her heart was in far profound challenges, and soon she started pushing the boundaries of her creativity. Deeply influenced by surrealism, especially by Magritte, she played with an artistic language that used gritty materials to the service of creating narratives that were the stuff of nightmares.

Over the years, she would go on to create a six feet cheese grater, with the capacity to shred a human arm to pieces, a mammoth structure made of bulbs and wires (Current Disturbance) that blinked on and off, and use a simple light bulb and wire mesh to insinuate terror and entrapment through shadows in perpetual motion. She even inserted a medical camera into her body, through her orifices, to have its inner life recorded.

In spite of the politically charged content of her work, it would be a disservice to Hatoum to reduce her to a Palestinian artist. While her interest lies in analyzing power structures, the interactions between the West and the East, and the structures of feelings that led to movements such as feminism, Hatoum is also, like most exceptional artists, a powerful purveyor of the human condition. In a rare interview with artist Janine Antoni, she expressed the purpose of her art in the following manner: “I 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."

Much of her work is based on the drama of the human body, often distorted beyond recognition. Marrow, for instance, uses a rubbery object to refer to the body drained of one of its vital components, the bone marrow. In another work, Hatoum recreates the map of Palestine, the body of her country as it were, according to the boundaries set by the Oslo Agreement: the idea was to allow the impression to fade away, the borders to dissolve organically, due to gradual weathering over time.

Although known for her daunting installations, Hatoum also created haunting video works, especially the autobiographical Measures of Distance in which she used the soundtrack of a conversation she had with her mother, in Arabic, with her own English voiceover juxtaposed on it.

Originating in a handful of photographs Hatoum had taken of her mother in the shower during one of her visits home, it is a work that emanates pain. The screen stays seemingly immobile for the 16 minutes the film runs. Mother and daughter catch up after four years. They indulge is banter and lament, they break into laughter and make heartbreaking laments. Yet, in spite of the undercurrent of longing and anxiety, there is sparkle and shimmer in her mother’s voice. “Consider yourself lucky for being a woman," she tells her daughter half-seriously, “You have to think about yourself only once a month, whereas men have to shave every day."

Texts in Arabic script appear on Hatoum’s photographs of her mother, but with a deliberate slowness that creates the illusion of stillness. Looking at the work from a distance, one may be deceived by the angular calligraphic edges of the alphabet, mistaking the script either for barbed wire or even a mesh that resembles a veil. In the end, the meaning of the piece is dispersed into these multiple associations.

The notion of the veil is validated by the screen of script that Hatoum puts between the viewer and the nudity of her mother. The barbed wire recalls the physical borders that separate the two women from one another. Appropriately, the work reveals the most movingly political meanings precisely because it is rooted in a deeply cherished private reality.

A fortnightly look at the world of art, from close and afar.

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Published: 25 Jul 2014, 10:11 PM IST
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