Keffieh
| 1993 - 1999 | human hair on cotton fabric | 120 x 120 cm
Home
and Away: The Strange Surrealism of Mona Hatoum*
By Alix Ohlin
There’s no
place like home, the saying goes, and the art of Mona Hatoum
sets out to prove this point in a distinctly unsettling
fashion. Home in her work is a mythical location: a place
charged with loss and violence, from which we are permanently
exiled, yet to which we are always drawn. In her spare,
minimalist installations, objects we may think we recognize—a
colander or a cheese grater—glow and buzz with menacing
electrical current, or loom ominously over our heads, many times
the sizes they ought to be. Known quantities, thus altered,
turn foreign. This familiarity breeds not contempt but a shared
sense of dislocation; viewers of Hatoum’s work step into her
world as strangers in a strange land.
Foreignness
has many associations, and Hatoum, whose style is edgily
surreal, highly controlled, and bold, adeptly exploits them
all. In her hands foreignness unfolds to reveal a tangled web
of implications: the feminist, the political, the Kafka-esque
existential. Though she first made her name with pieces
focusing on the body, Hatoum has lately moved towards less
narrative, and consequently more elusive, work. Yet this shift
has not robbed her art of its impact. In fact, her recent work
gathers its force from the indirect, mysterious ways in which it
probes the fractured dream of home.
Hatoum was
born in Lebanon of Palestinian parents who, due to the
reluctance of Lebanese authorities, were never able to obtain
Lebanese identity cards, and became naturalized British citizens
instead. As a result, the feeling of not quite belonging to the
society in which she lived ingrained itself into her existence
early on. Later political events increased this sense of
alienation: in her early-twenties, Hatoum traveled to London for
what was intended to be a brief visit. Then civil war broke out
in Lebanon, and she was not able to return home. Stranded in
London, she attended art school, studying at both The Byam Shaw
School of Art and the Slade School of Art and absorbing in her
training the disjunctive humor of surrealism as well as the
streamlined composure of minimalism. That break in her twenties
turned out to be fateful; Hatoum has lived in the West ever
since.
Still based in
London and more recently dividing her time between there and
Berlin, Hatoum spends a great deal of her time traveling, and
she has created much of her recent work during stays at artists’
residencies. This nomadic lifestyle—as well as her bifurcated
personal history in both the Middle East and the West—informs
her work with a uniquely global perspective.
Understandably, Hatoum has rebelled
against being over-identified with her biography. “I’m often
asked the same question,” she told the artist Janine Antoni in a
1998 interview. “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.”
But to take her background into consideration when thinking
about her art is not the same thing as reducing it to the sum of
its geographical parts. And, undeniably, her work courts a
certain amount of biographical interpretation; it walks a fine
line between invoking specific conflicts and referring more
abstractly to human violence and cruelty. Without communicating
direct political messages, most pieces ring with political
echoes.
In her
sculptures No Way and No Way II (1996), for
example, she plugged the holes of a strainer and a colander with
metal bolts, so that these objects take on the appearance of
weapons (a mace and a land mine). According to Hatoum, who made
the first of these sculptures during a residency in Jerusalem,
the inspiration for these works came to her when she experienced
the frequent and unexpected obstruction of roads by military
police in that city. But the connotations evoked by these
pieces do not end there. Because they are made from kitchen
objects most frequently used by women, No Way and No
Way II seem to express a sense of claustrophobia, even deep
rage, experienced by women alone.
Indeed, in
much of Hatoum’s work, areas of the home we associate with
female nurturing and comfort—the kitchen, the bedroom, the
nursery—are charged with menace and distortion. The result is
a sense of domesticity set against itself, of cognitive
dissonance between the traditional function of the objects
displayed and their materials and execution. In
Incommunicado (1993), a cradle made of steel, set on wheels,
its springs replaced by cheese wires, suggests abuse and
imprisonment rather than the sleeping safety of an infant.
Similarly, Grater Divide (2002) looks like a folding
screen—one that might typically segment off parts of a room, or
that a woman might change clothes behind—but is pocked with the
slanted holes of a cheese grater, so that the object evokes not
privacy but a visceral terror of abrasion. Dormiente
(2008) offers an equally mismatched pairing of object and
materials: it’s a bed one would never want to lie on, on which
no rest would ever come. Beautifully made and scary, these
devices attract and repel simultaneously.
Over
my dead body | 1988 | billboard, ink on paper | 204 x
304 cm
Even
children’s toys are deployed to uncanny effect, as Hatoum
makes use of miniature soldiers. In Over My Dead
Body (1988-2002), a billboard shows Hatoum’s face
in profile, as she stares down a toy soldier perched on her
nose. A sense of humor enlivens this photograph, as
Hatoum’s haughty stare makes oppression and war seem
tiny, even laughable. She stares at the soldier the
way one might look at an annoying fly. And yet the text
of the title is important: “over my dead body,”
for many people in the world, is a reality that can’t
be shrunken or reduced. In ∞ (infinity)
(1991-2001), the toy soldiers march in the formation of an
infinity symbol, never achieving anything, endlessly in pursuit
of an unseen enemy. Arranged on an end table, such as
might be found in a person’s living room, this commentary
on the never-ending circularity of war is both puckishly humorous
and pointedly critical.
If ∞
(infinity) is playful, then Misbah (2006) is ghostly
and sad, using light and shadow to construct an atmosphere of
mystery and violence. In this work, the cutouts of a brass
lantern (misbah is the Arabic word for lantern) cast illuminated
silhouettes of soldiers and stars into a dark room. . As the
lantern constantly rotates, the soldiers rush around the room,
and the star-shapes blur, taking on the look of explosions. The
motion induces twin feelings of enchantment and sea-sickness.
All these toy soldier pieces are imbued with Hatoum’s trademark
ambiguity. Do they make war small, something to look down
upon? Or do they remind us that war is bred into us even as
children, even in the way that we play, so that there is no
innocence in the world?
Thus, not even
the simplest object, in Hatoum’s hands, is innocent, and no
refuge can be found anywhere. Every Door a Wall (2003)
takes an ordinary curtain and inscribes it with a newspaper
article describing an X-ray scan of illegal immigrants smuggled
inside a truck, showing that we can’t, and shouldn’t, hide
behind the covering comforts of home decor. Perhaps nowhere is
this juxtaposition more neatly expressed than in Doormat II
(2000-01) in which the word “welcome” is recessed among
stainless steel pins that resemble a bed of nails. Whatever
home viewers of this work are being ushered into, they had
better be careful inside. Doormat II also evokes the
colloquial use of the word doormat for a person in a
relationship, usually a woman, who allows herself to be
dominated and abused. The pins, then, offer a sly image of
resistance, the prickly threat of an oppressed person waiting to
seek revenge on the oppressor. Thus, once again, associations
of home retain a gendered edge, articulating an embedded
feminism, at once wry and biting.
Hatoum’s feminist concerns date back to
the early stages of her career, when she first garnered critical
attention for video, and performance pieces focusing on the
body. In So Much I Want to Say (1983), a video shows her
mouth gagged by male hands, while a voice repeats the title.
The sound occurs at normal speed, while the image stutters,
updating from a still every eight seconds. The disjunction
between sound and visual adds extra impact to the already
powerful image of censorship. Like many of Hatoum’s pieces,
this work situates the body as the locus of a network of
concerns—political, feminist, and linguistic—thereby eliciting a
highly visceral response. “I have always been dissatisfied with
work that just appeals to your intellect and does not actually
involve you in a physical way,” Hatoum once told interviewer
Michael Archer. “For me, the embodiment of an artwork is within
the physical realm; the body is the axis of our perceptions, so
how can art afford not take that as a starting point? We relate
to the world through our senses.”
Likewise,
Hatoum’s work Measures of Distance (1988) layers
complex resonances on the body. It shows video footage
of her mother in the shower, with Arabic text across the image
of her naked body. Like a veil or a fence made of barbed
wire, language cuts across her body but does not disguise
it, leaving its essential outlines and the fact of its nudity
plain. The piece re-appropriates the image of the female
body as one that exists to be objectified by a male gaze—the
gaze here is one of longing, but it is a longing between mother
and daughter, between people and language, between camera
and the subject. The sound of letters between Hatoum
and her mother being read out loud accompanies the scenes,
recording a dialogue between mother and daughter across a
geographical expanse, as well as across the gap between generations.
The soundtrack has Hatoum reading the letters in a monotone
while an animated Arabic conversation also takes place, neither
mode or language privileged above the other; so too with the
image of the naked body, overlaid with text. Measures
of Distance is about multiplicity of sound and image and
culture, a multi-layered, multi-media portrait of co-existence.
The mood is one of both love and sorrow, because the multiplicity
arises from fracture, separation, and displacement.
Traffic
| 2002 | compressed card, plastic, metal, beeswax, human hair
| 48 x 65 x 68 cm
Starting from
these early pieces, Hatoum has continued to employ the body as
material for art, down to the use of her own hair. In Jardin
Public (1993), a chair sports a neat triangle of pubic
hair. In its punning title (public/pubic) and its clever
portrait of the body in an inanimate object Jardin Public
conjures the Surrealist spirit and wit of Magritte. According
to Hatoum, the piece is rooted in the common etymology of public
and pubic, referencing the advent of sexual adulthood, and the
concomitant entrance into civic life on the part of an
individual. In Traffic (2002), two suitcases sit on the
floor, attached by a thick mass of human hair. This work
presents a dense set of meanings. It can be seen as a metaphor
for those who travel, carrying their baggage (emotional,
cultural and literal) from one culture to another. At the same
time, it reminds us that no object exists in our lives without
getting tangled up in our own bodies, our emotions, and our
sense of ourselves. Lastly, its title seems to suggest an
association with human trafficking; perhaps the hair is spilling
out from a body not quite contained within these two suitcases.
The juxtaposition between the untidy reaches of the body and the
rigid asceticism of the object evokes the Freudian shiver of the
uncanny. In much the same way, Keffieh (1993-1999) shows
us a scarf (a headdress traditionally worn by Arab men)
embroidered with hair, whose tendrils escape it on all sides.
The tendril motif, which recurs elsewhere in Hatoum’s work,
lends this piece a vivid and snakelike animism, reminding us
that culture is alive and breathing, arisen from and written on
the body.
Recently,
Hatoum’s art has migrated into new areas, while maintaining its
feminist and political consciousness. Instead of showcasing the
physical presence of the body, the work tends to present
household objects, such as furniture and kitchen implements,
whose relationship to human beings is implied rather than shown.
Often there are cages and barriers containing these objects,
isolating them from the viewer, as if in a prison cell. The
resulting installations, deserted by people yet haunted by their
presence, create a malevolent atmosphere that suggests the
aftermath of violent events. Situated with obvious care within
the hallowed space of a museum, they could be the preserved
artifacts of some deeply disturbed, by possibly fictional,
culture—remnants by which its character may be judged.
In
Homebound (2000), part of Hatoum’s Tate Britain exhibit “The
Entire World as a Foreign Land,” the contents of the kitchen and
bedroom stand in an empty space, behind a wire fence. Though
removed from the building that once housed them, these objects
are nonetheless situated as they would be inside: the chairs,
for example, are grouped around a table as they would be in a
kitchen. Scattered on top of the table lie various utensils: a
cheese grater, a sieve, a colander. Lights strung within these
utensils brighten and dim and the 240-volt electrical current
that connects them is amplified to a threatening buzz. Also
furnishing the scene are a cot, a lamp, a birdcage, and a sofa
stripped down to its metal frame; no fabric or mattress appears
anywhere to soften the harsh edges of these skeletal objects.
Where are the
people who once lived in this strange, uncomfortable home? They
have either escaped its confines or been evicted from it; the
wire fence exists either to protect the viewer on the outside or
to hold in the family. A sense of unknown catastrophe emanates
from the place. Presumably the scene contains clues to some
mysterious past events, if we only knew how to decipher them.
The noted Palestinian scholar Edward Said
has written of Hatoum’s installations that “in the age of
migrants, curfews, identity cards, refugees, exiles, massacres,
camps and fleeing civilians…they are the uncooptable mundane
instruments of a defiant memory facing itself and its pursuing
and oppressing others.”
But Hatoum doesn’t wield these instruments of memory, as Said
calls them, with blunt force. Questions linger: did the family
leave for good? Were they killed? Would they even want to
return to such a frightening, potentially harmful place?
There’s a lot of ambiguity to this work, and that may be the
point. Lacking a definitive frame of reference, Homebound
refuses to moralize about a particular culture or to name the
names of either the oppressor or the oppressed.
Said’s work famously has sought to address
how cultural products, including literature and visual arts,
have been used to grant authority to political coercion. At the
same time, he has documented the complex interreactions, even
mutual influence, between East and West. “To ignore or
otherwise discount the overlapping experience of Westerns and
Orientals,” he has written, “the interdependence of cultural
terrains in which colonizer and colonized co-existed and battled
each other through projections, as well as rival geographies,
narrative, and histories, is to miss what is essential about the
world in the last century.”
It is exactly
this overlapping experience—one that obfuscates the “tidy
definitions of otherness” she mentioned to Janine Antoni—that
Hatoum’s work is uniquely situated to express. This art doesn’t
bridge cultures; it doesn’t bring disparate people together and
unify them in sentiment or spirit. Rather, her ghostly
installations boil these rival geographies and histories down to
a minimalist essence, leaving on the barest furnishings behind.
As a result, all cultures—and all viewers—are implicated in the
punishing scenarios her installations put on display.
Like
Homebound, Undercurrent (2004), uses electricity to
create an atmosphere of threat. It is composed of electrical
cable, light bulbs, and a computerized unit that brightens and
dims the lights at the pace, Hatoum has said, of “slow
breathing.” The nucleus of the sculpture is a square mat of
woven cable, from which tendrils snake across the floor, each
strand ending in a 15-watt bulb.
The
ambiguity of the work begins with its ingredients. Cable has
a specific function—to provide the wiring inside buildings—and
we are generally told to stay away from it when exposed.
Light bulbs are meant to brighten the interiors of built spaces.
They hang from ceilings, covered by lampshades or fixtures,
and are not to be laid out on the ground. Undercurrent,
then, seems composed of a building collapsed and turned inside
out, its skeleton exposed. If the square at its center
recalls a carpet, the house it conjures is not a cozy one.
Instead, the mood created is obliquely menacing, hinting of
cellars and interrogation rooms, of dangerous areas where
we will not be safe.
Given that the
building for which these components were designed has apparently
evaporated, we might ask what function they are now serving. We
seem to catch them in the midst of an evolution into something
else. Consider the shape of the cable as it spills out from the
square mat into individual, curving tendrils. Splayed out on
the floor, the work seems to create its own territory, like a
map of some invented land. Each tendril reaches out from the
center towards some new geography. If left alone, the movement
of the tendrils suggests, Undercurrent might continue to
expand across the floor, annexing the space around it. Here, as
elsewhere in her work, Hatoum invests ordinary objects with
political echoes.
Finally, and
perhaps most intriguingly, Undercurrent looks—and
acts—like more than an object. Though cable and light bulbs
have mechanical functions, the tendrils have a delicate and
animated feel. In the biomorphic structure of its cables, with
the breathing pace of its lights, the work seems to glow with
purpose and intent. It could be an organism, a being with
consciousness. Perhaps that consciousness is malevolent: the
sinuous tendrils evoke Medusa’s head, that frightening nucleus
covered with snakes, one glance from which could turn a person
to stone. In this sense, encountering Undercurrent feels
like a reckless form of trespass. Or perhaps the consciousness
of the work is not threatening but poignantly isolated, its
glowing lights emitting a message whose meaning we are unable to
decipher.
A
living being, territory, or house turned inside out: all of
these associations can be layered into Hatoum’s work.
Each of them gives us the feeling of a world where things
are not quite as they should be—in a way we can’t
quite put our finger on. The bulbs brighten and dim
in silence, hinting at all the trouble we know goes on beneath
the surface, all the disturbing undercurrents of our time.
Home
| 1999 | wood, stainless steel, electric wire, light bulbs,
computerised dimmer unit, amplifier, speakers | 77 x 198 x
73.5 cm
Another
installation work, Home (1999), consists of a rectangular
table behind a wire fence, cluttered by the same kind of
mechanical kitchen implements (colanders, graters, a whisk, a
ladle, a grinder) made of gleaming stainless steel. Arrayed on
the table, these tools glow with light and buzz with an audible
electrical current. They could be a nightmare version of a
child’s fantasy—that his toys come to life at night, when he is
not present to witness their behavior—or they could be weapons,
though it is left to the viewer to imagine how they would be
deployed. Home is frightening in the same way that
darkness and music are the scariest part of horror movies: a
sense of danger infuses the atmosphere, but the exact nature of
the threat remains unclear. Regardless, the danger zone of
Home is clearly a domestic area, and therefore one that is
feminine. Electrified and behind wire, Home suggests
that gender itself may be a dangerous territory, as well as a
form of exile.
This sense of
gender and territory entwined together harks back to Corps
Étranger, Hatoum’s well-known 1994 video installation. The
title of this installation, which translates as “Foreign Body,”
refers to the body of an individual foreigner—Hatoum herself—but
also to the multiple degrees of intrusion involved in its
execution and viewing. To make the video, Hatoum had a doctor
insert a tiny endoscopic camera (itself a foreign body) inside
her. The resulting film draws a highly magnified map of the
human form: traveling from her eye to the inside of her flesh,
over the geography of her skin. As the camera moves across
living tissue and trails along her skin, it shows the body in
amazing detail: in shades of red and brown and white, wet and
dry, highly visceral, and pulsating with life. The images play
on a circular screen set into the floor, while the screen itself
is placed inside a wooden cylinder—like a large circular voting
or telephone booth—which the viewer must enter.
Corps Étranger
turns a woman’s body inside out and puts that interior on
display. By closing in on that territory, it forces us to look
at the body in an unusual way. As a result, its images cleverly
overturn the objectification of the woman’s body pervasive in
Western society: you may see every part of a woman in a men’s
magazine, but you surely won’t see her capillaries or organs or
the inner cavities of her body.
The
installation can also be interpreted as a commentary on the
veiling of the female body prevalent in many Eastern societies.
Feminists such as Fatima Mernissi have argued that sexual
inequality in Islamic societies is based on a view of the female
body as the source of some threatening power, a danger that has
to be contained. To neutralize this threat, women must be
covered—which is to say dressed, veiled, and secluded.
In Corps
Étranger, the ultimate private space becomes public, and the
largeness of the images of the female body lends them a
frightening, even consuming power. Yet it would be wrong to say
that there is no veil or seclusion here. The cylinder that
encloses the video adds a layer of confinement that the viewer
is forced to share; in order to see these images, you must step
inside and join the body in its secretive place. You must look
down on the images too, since the video, set in the floor, plays
at your feet. So the viewer’s position in relation to the work
is conspicuously complicated by its formal elements: you have to
examine where you stand. As in You Are Still Here
(1994), in which text on a mirror speaks directly to the
viewer’s reflection, this work involves and implicates the
viewer—personally, physically, even geographically.
Like Franz
Kafka, another artist who felt perpetually alienated from the
society in which he lived, Hatoum seems to thrive on immersing
the viewer in these intricate divisions between inside and
outsider. Kafka, a German Jew who lived in Czech-speaking
Prague, threaded the feeling of dislocation through the fabric
of his work, and Hatoum—fluent in Arabic, French, and English,
born in one country, with allegiance to a second and a life
lived in a third—does the same. What rises from this outsider’s
sensibility is a parallel universe worthy of science fiction:
their work inhabits an alternate reality where regular lives
assume dream-like forms.
In
Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” for instance,
Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a bug.
His horrified family keeps him in a dark room. Whenever
his sister comes in to clean the room, Gregor considerately
hides under the couch and veils himself with a sheet.
As time goes on, the family more or less forgets about him,
piling the room with unwanted furniture, so that the territory
that Gregor once occupied as his own becomes the repository
for the unwanted detritus of the family’s domestic life.
In the end, effectively evicted from his family’s memory,
he dies alone. In Corps Étranger, the body undergoes
a similar metamorphosis. Enlarged and onscreen, it turns
into a bug under a microscope. Once an easily accepted
fact of life, a regular human body, it grows uncomfortably,
massively different, tempting the viewer to reject it just
as Gregor’s family rejected him.
La
grande broyeuse (Mouli-Juliene x 17) | 1999 | mild steel
| main sculpture: 343 x 575 x 363 cm, discs: each 4.5 x 170
cm diameterm
In much the
same way, La grande broyeuse (Mouli-Julienne x 21)
(2000) plays with scale to create an alternate reality where
the familiar grows strange. A Mouli-Julienne, a kind of grinder
for meat or vegetables, is magnified into an enormous structure
that towers over the heads of its human audience. Standing tall
on three legs, with its erect handle, it looks more like a
sensate animal than a simple tool. At its center, where the
food to be milled would be placed, is a giant cavity, a
devouring space that is easy to see as a vagina dentate writ
humorously large. Yet there are more meanings at play in La
grande broyeuse than just this psycho-sexual one; as in
Hatoum’s other work, the feminine is inextricably connected to
other forms of strangeness.
Hatoum herself
has referred to Kafka as a source of inspiration for her work,
specifically connecting his story “In The Penal Colony” to La
grande broyeuse. “In the Penal Colony” tells the tale of a
traveler visiting an unnamed colony in a foreign land—a
distinctly non-European locale characterized as a sandy valley
with barren slopes and an oppressively hot climate. In this
place he encounters an officer who is about to execute a
condemned man for disobeying his superiors. The officer and the
traveler speak French while the condemned man does not, a
linguistic gap that supports the colonial framework of the
story.
The device
used for the execution is both laborious and sadistic. It
involves a set of needles that will inscribe a lesson (in his
case, “Honor Thy Superiors”) on the condemned man’s body. This
monstrous tattoo will slowly pierce his body through, putting
him to an agonizing death. As in Hatoum’s video Measures of
Distance, words are overlaid upon the body; but in Kafka’s
literally harrowing tale, language functions not just as image
but as murder weapon.
Deeply
enamored of this machine, the officer hopes the traveler will
condone its use, but he is horrified instead. At the story’s
climax, understanding that the machine’s days of use are coming
to an end, the officer pardons the condemned man and takes his
place, ordering the machine to write the words “Be Just” on his
own body. When it goes into action the machine self-destructs,
though not before killing the officer. As it falls apart,
numerous gears shaped like immense round cog-wheels rise up from
it and spill to the ground.
Next to the
grinder of La grande broyeuse three large disks lie on
the ground, as if they too have spilled from the machine. In
light of Kafka’s story, La grande broyeuse seems to
occupy a specific moment: after the machine has begun to
self-destruct, yet before it falls apart completely. Broken but
standing, the machine seems ready for reu-use. So too with the
power relationships the work evokes, from colonial politics
written on the body to the danger zones of womanhood; they haunt
us still.
What does it
mean to say that Hatoum’s work is Kafka-esque? The link between
them is important not just because of the surrealism that
suffuses their work, but because that surrealism serves to draw
attention, again and again, to the possibility that things can
vanish: a body, a room, a home. At the conclusion of “In The
Penal Colony,” the traveler flees the colony, but the story
doesn’t say where he’s going, and it seems unlikely that he’ll
be able to forget what he has just seen even if he eventually
does get home. As Said has pointed out, the impact of
colonialism continues to reverberate throughout the modern
world, in the globalized lives we lead, and the intersecting
power structures that affect us all. The work of Mona Hatoum
plots the outlines of these shifting reverberations. If the
entire world is a foreign land, then her wok draws a chilling
map of the terrain.
* This text is
an expanded version of an article with the same title first
published in Art Papers, Atlanta, May-June 2002
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