The States of Being in Mona Hatoum’s Artwork

By Salwa Mikdadi

Central to Hatoum’s oeuvre is the elemental human psyche that she elucidates with precision and an economy of material and form that is the hallmark of minimalism and conceptual art. Her exhibitions are permeated with the tension of oppositional emotive experiences--desire and revulsion, safety and fear, security and threat—thereby creating ‘states of being’ within which the viewer is at once implicated and challenged.

Hatoum’s style is distinguished by the phenomenological perception that conveys simultaneous feelings of perceived normalcy and impending danger, keeping the viewer’s psyche in constant flux. As a result, the visitor’s senses are heightened, left in a state of instability while also attuned to their own physical presence. Once inside Hatoum’s world, there is ‘no way out.’ Within this state, one is forced to question the reality of the human condition within the personal as well as current socio-political context. Hatoum’s artistic strategy is clearly articulated through the words of Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni, “ [for the artist] … it is a question of the conscious immersion in himself through which, once he has got beyond the individual and contingent level, he can probe deep down to reach the living germ of total humanity.” [1]

Installation and mixed media practices are relatively new to the Arab world due to the almost non-existence of post-modern theoretical discourse in art education. Hatoum’s exhibition is therefore in stark contrast to most regional exhibitions in which the art object dictates the narrative and the experience is aesthetic rather than experiential. In this much overdue solo exhibition at Darat al Funun, Hatoum employs a wide range of media including installation, sculpture, video and performance to address subjects such as the body, gender, home, exile, identity, power structures, control, life, and death. This body of work manipulates the intrinsic qualities of materials, often appropriated from the local culture, to subvert an object’s familiar function within the space and site of the exhibition. [2]   

This strategy is clearly at work in Misbah (2006-7) a kinetic installation at Darat al Funun. Misbah, the Arabic term for lantern, was originally created in 2006 for an exhibition at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo. The work is composed of a constantly rotating brass lantern incised with the figures of soldiers and eight-pointed stars. Upon entering the space, the viewer is drawn to a soft, mesmerizing light in the darkened room. On the room’s walls and ceiling, the circling lantern casts the silhouettes of soldiers brandishing guns, constantly pursuing one another in a perpetual cycle that engulfs the visitor in its dizzying motion.

The installation, which at first invokes happy childhood memories of lanterns popular during Ramadan, is abruptly invaded by the soldiers so that the work becomes a metaphor for lost innocence and a childhood interrupted by violence and conflict. No matter where the viewer stands in the space, his/her body becomes the central axis of this celestial motion that evokes the purity of Mandalas or Sufic dance, a purity eclipsed by the soldiers’ multiple shadows whose perpetual rotation is a metaphor for the futility of war.

In the context of Jordan, a country that prides itself on its relative political stability in a region beset with conflict, Misbah destabilizes this status quo by threatening the safety and comfort of the ‘buffer zone’ that claims to shield from violence. The viewer’s unsettling encounter with Hatoum’s work is further accentuated by the physical setting of the exhibition spaces at Darat al Funun. Housed in a 1920s renovated home, the galleries’ thick stone walls muffle the surrounding urban noise and maintain a cool interior typical of the tranquil and sheltered spaces in Islamic architecture. The serene and contemplative environment of the building contrasts with the emotions elicited by the installation.

In Hatoum’s art, themes and objects employed in past artworks often reappear in later works. Over a 24 year period, for instance, the figure of toy-soldier recurs in a number of pieces. This is not surprising considering the number of wars the artist has witnessed in her life-time. Over my dead body (1988) shows a photograph of the artist’s face in profile with a toy-soldier perilously poised on her nose. The title of the work appears in bold next to the image. Hatoum’s rebellious facial expression works with the miniature size of the toy to diminish and shift the conventional authority of the figure of the solider. Moreover, Hatoum co-opts her own body to interrogate the dominant power structure: Using humor as a strategy, Hatoum elucidates political and feminist concerns as she defiantly dismisses Western stereotypes of the subjugated Arab or Muslim woman whose body has been the site of the Orientalist gaze and, most recently, one of the reasons justifying the recent “liberation” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Over my dead body, first created as a billboard, has become one of Hatoum’s iconic images. In contrast to other works in which the viewer’s subjectivity is the site of mediation, in this work it is the artist’s body that is the locus through which patriarchal authority and power are resisted. Roadworks (1985) is another such example. Just as  Over my dead body focuses on Hatoum’s profile so Roadworks zooms in on her bare feet. In both works, the body’s visual fragmentation represents what art historian Amelia Jones describes how, “artists at the turn of the twenty-first century have performed or produced images of the body’s incompletion that negotiate the death-dealing capacity of representation and explore our desire to make and view pictures as means of producing/projecting substitute bodies.”[3]

The theme of war is again witnessed in three other works in the present exhibition. In Round and round (2007) a circle of toy-soldiers cast in bronze are placed on a bronze table, similar in shape to coffee end-table. The piece’s reference to the futility of war complements Misbah, described earlier, in addition to the works Untitled (cut-out 1)  and Untitled (cut-out 2), both from 2005. The latter were inspired by Mexican banners of cut-out tissue paper that the artist came across during a residency in Mexico a few years earlier.[4]  In both works, the outline of soldiers face each other in combat surrounded by the pattern of eight- pointed stars that appear like explosions, transforming these festive banners into a deadly reminder of the vicious cycle of war.

Issues of conflict are apparent in another recent installation composed of a conventional war object: the hand-grenade. Nature morte aux grenades (2008) demonstrates Hatoum’s brilliant fusion of material and subject. Upon first glance, crystal shapes, produced in Italy, resemble a selection of deceptively seductive candy. Only upon closer inspection does the viewer become aware of the strong visual resemblance of these “candies” to hand-grenades. A ceramic version of this work Still Life (2008) was produced for this exhibition in collaboration with the Iraqi al Amir Craft Village in Jordan. The village’s ceramic workshop is a collective of women who replicate small urns and archaeological artifacts, dating back to the Hellenistic & Byzantine times, unearthed in nearby sites.The colorful objects were crafted in the shapes of diverse types of grenades such as those referred to as pomegranate, ball, egg, lemon and pineapple. Disguised as delicate decorative objects the grenades invert their conventional associations with war and death. Hatoum’s choice of the title represents a second, clever inversion--the Dutch tradition of still lives, known as nature mortes, that spoke to mortality.   

Controlling Processes [5]

I first encountered Mona Hatoum’s work on a street in Brixton, London. I had three young children in tow, trying to navigate through a crowded street next to an open market in a predominantly low income African-Caribbean neighborhood.  Hatoum was walking barefoot dragging a pair of Doc Martin boots with their laces tied to her ankles (Roadwork’s (1985) a video of the performance is part of this exhibition).  In Hatoum’s performance, they were reduced to followers instead of leaders, an act that transgressed the authority traditionally symbolized by the boots. Furthermore, the empty boots interrogated the power structure of racism through their association with  groups such as the National Front.  At the time, I was unaware of the work’s reference to the Brixton riots, sparked by heightened police presence in the area. As an Arab American living in California, I associated performance art with gender, identity and racial issues as evident in the work of Judy Chicago, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy and other women artists. I saw in Hatoum’s work one of the first attempts by an Arab artist to respond to a local incident not of immediate relevance to Arab culture. Instead, the performance addressed the local politics of her adopted home while also clearly resonating with the colonial and post-colonial political power structure in the Arab world.

The themes of control, surveillance and coercive power are at the heart of Hatoum’s work. On arriving in London in 1975 Hatoum became aware of the proliferation of surveillance camera in public places. The Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ invasion of personal and public space were first explored in the performances Don’t smile you’re on camera (1980) and Look no body! (1981). Today, with the rise of control over all aspects of our lives we are more aware of its subtle forms and can better appreciate Hatoum’s early observations on its menacing consequences.

The tension between the individual and authority/institution is a theme that runs through several of Hatoum’s works and in the novels of the Jordanian-born Saudi writer Abdelrahman Munif, one of the most prominent Arab writers of the 20^th century.  Munif’s quintet novel ‘Cities of Salt’ portrays the transformation of the Bedoiun culture of a fictional kingdom; it depicts the apprehension that seized the country in the early years after the discovery of oil. Munif’s epic novel is a scathing portrayal of the birth of an authoritarian regime or ‘police state’ sustained by foreign oil corporations and a dominant surveillance culture so pervasive that, according to Munif it, "… can hear ants crawling in the dark.” [6]  The state of incarceration whether real or metaphorical is a recurring theme in his novels he describes the state of war, violence and entrapment as a normal consequence of the lack of freedom, individual liberties and self-determination. [7] Control and incarceration are themes woven into the grid found in several of Hatoum's work.

Grid Power

In the late eighties, Hatoum initiated a body of work that took first the grill then the grid as its basis. These installations forced viewers to engage with an object whose materiality prompted a physical and sensory experience. In The Light at the End (1989 Hatoum arranges six electric heating rods in a grill. Although the piece recalls Dan Flavin’s vertical arrangement of neon lights bulbs, Hatoum overlays the installation with an additional spatial metaphor: that of a prison cell. From a distance the elements’ orange hue is seductively alluring, attracting the viewer closer only to be repelled by its threatening heat. Moreover, the viewer is unsure whether the rods serve to protect or entrap. In this way, Hatoum interrogates the language of Minimalism by endowing it with socio-political relevance.

The grid as a medium of control is also explored in Grater Divide (2002) in which a Victorian three fold-out cheese grater is scaled up to human dimensions. Once again, domesticity at a distance transforms into a threatening menace up closer. The menacing serrated holes of the grater appear are like camera apertures following the viewer’s every move. The grid’s rigid and precise pattern becomes the viewer’s mental and physical incarceration: there is no central point of reprieve. Its seriality overpowers body and mind. Desa Philippi describes the repetition of the grid as speaking to an involuntary compulsion associated with death in Freudian theories of psychoanalysis in which repetition, “Signals lack of control and self-determination.” [8]  There is a feeling of domestic confinement evoked in several of Hatoum’s works such as Grater Divide with its ‘mashrabeyyah’-like screen or wire fence surrounding familial objects in Homebound is referenced by Algerian writer and film maker Assia Djebar in her novel ‘Women of Algiers in Their Apartment’. Djebar employs the wire as a metaphor for the unattainable status of empowerment of women in post-independent Algeria, “Barbed wire no longer obstructs the alleys, now it decorates windows, balconies, anything at all that opens onto an outside space . . .”[9]

The disquieting exaggeration of the physical object of a kitchen grater is multiplied in the installation Light Sentence (1992). In this piece, two rows of wire-mesh lockers are stacked and joined in a U shape to create a grid that runs down the center of a large long room and towers over the viewer. A motorized bare bulb at the end of a wire moves slowly up and down, casting the shadow of the lockers on the floor, ceiling, and walls. The movement of the bulb creates lacey grid -like shadows that ripple on the walls, destabilizing the room’s materiality and security by simulating an earthquake-like tremor.  Inside the space, the viewer’s oversized shadow blends with the lockers’ reflection, creating a visceral response of confinement and instability. The lockers, similar to cages used in animal experimentation, suggest life in densely populated urban spaces where people seem caged in a concrete jungle of uniform low income tenement blocks.  As in a number of Hatoum’s works, the title is a play on words—referencing both, the phrase, “a light prison sentence,” and the contrasting state of revere created by the movement of the soft shadows in the beam of light.

In Interior Landscape (2008), an installation created specifically for this exhibition, Hatoum worked with a local blacksmith to transform the wire support of a bed into a grid of barbed wire. Set in an alcove, the bed, without its mattress and with its chipped paint, resembles a prison bed. A symbol of comfort and repose becomes a nightmarish object. In stark contrast to the bed’s barbed wire base, Hatoum placed a soft pillow onto which she has sown a map of historic Palestine with strands of her own hair. Stray hairs that naturally fall out on beddings and pillows are considered unclean and repulsive, usually brushed off in disgust. Here, however, the strands of hair coalesce into the map of Palestine, as if responding to a persistent dream.

This map of Palestine is repeated on the wall next to the barbed-wire bed. Fashioned from a pink wire clothing hanger, the map hangs like a lifeless silhouette. Next to it, a basket-like paper bag cut out from a printed map of Palestine is suspended, its body slotted like a chain-link wire fence. A small three- legged coffee table wobbles against the wall, unsteady in its support of a light-weight paper plate on which the artist has drawn map-like shapes by simply tracing the outline of oil stains. The bedroom we normally associate with peace and tranquility is turned into discordant space filled with tension and uncertainty. None of the objects are functional a bed without a mattress; a broken table; a cut out map; a useless hanger. Together, the objects create a disconcerting surrealist landscape. In this piece, as in others, Hatoum creates a domestic space that “offers neither rest nor respite.” [10]  In this way, the installation serves as a metaphor for the state of being for Palestinian refugees living the longest ongoing conflict in modern history.

Passage of time, memory and loss are central to the history of the 'nakba' or catastrophe of 1948 when over half of the population of Palestine was uprooted from their homes. In Static II (2008) an ornate metal chair, ordinarily found in quaint gardens of secure and blissful homes, is also victim of lost time, represented by the spider web grid that covers the chair. The web is made of red glass beads symbolizing red poppies, a common association to homeland and sacrifice in Palestinian literature.  Mona Hatoum’s parents were dispossessed of their home in Haifa and took refuge in Lebanon. Like all Palestinians, they believed that they would soon return to retrieve their personal belongings. It was not the case. Their home, like many others, was seized along with all their furnishings: art works, carpets, family photos, and heirlooms. After sixty years, each object--from mundane to precious-- is fixed in nakba’s time, faithfully waiting for its rightful owner. The chair in Static II signifies both loss of home and the triumph of memory.

Less formidable and more delicate, the grid in Untitled (willow cage) 2002 is composed of willow twigs, woven together in the shape of a bird cage. The simple construction and natural material is poetic and indicates a balanced relationship with nature. Moreover, the door is left open and the top section of the cage is unwoven.  In this work, the grid’s incompleteness signifies freedom and optimism in contrast to feelings of entrapment in works such as the Light Sentence.       

From steel to twigs, to the most delicate and unruly material of human hair, the grid takes on new meanings in Hatoum’s work. In Keffieh (1993-99), the Arab male headdress associated with masculinity is embroidered with human hair to create the traditional grid pattern of the keffieh. Stray fringes of hair peek seductively from the edges of this square headdress like the untamed strands of hair that slip from under the hair covering (veil) worn by conservative Moslem women. Through material and form, Hatoum suggests the proximity of female hair and male in order to comment on Arab and Islamic social norms and gender roles. Indeed, the piece questions taboos by feminizing a symbol of masculinity. Hatoum attributes this work to a common expression, ‘I was so angry, I was about to pull my hair out’. Hatoum explains: “I imagined women pulling their hair out in anger and controlling that anger through the patient act of transcribing those same strands of hair into an everyday item of clothing that has become a potent symbol of the Palestinian resistance movement. The act of embroidering can be seen in this case as another language, a kind of quiet protest.”

Traditionally a female task, weaving requires patience and long, repetitious hours. However, this tedious yet creative work is one for which women are underpaid and rarely recognized for their artistic abilities. As a young girl-scout in Beirut, Hatoum used a simple hand-made loom, its wooden frame studded with metal spikes evenly spaced around the edges to weave small mats that were later combined to create rugs/bedding for the poor. The artist used a similar loom to weave Hair grids with knots (2006) a set of six woven hair grids, 10 cm square each, painstakingly woven in an open grid then knotted together, removed from the confines of the loom the hair grid hangs limply and precariously from long strands of hair. In contrast to the grid which is tightly woven ‘electric wire’ mat in Undercurrent (2004), the Hair grid with knots is less rigid and more fluid: its warp and weft is left open as if the dreams and thoughts of women trapped in tight weave of carpets are now free. The delicate and ephemeral nature of hair is in contrasted with the Hatoum’s use of barbed wire in other works, the piece is so fine and delicate that it is barely visible, yet the grid structure gives it strength. The work recalls the binaries of order and disorder, rigid form and free form, and captivity and freedom. It also references the passage of time, life and death and the social taboos regarding body debris

Mapping the Grid

There are several maps in this exhibition that trace their origin to Hatoum’s Present Tense, created in 1996 during a residency at Anadiel Gallery in Jerusalem where she had her fist solo exhibition in the Arab world.  Present Tense is an installation piece of a grid composed of 2,400 blocks of olive oil soap from the town Nablus, north of Jerusalem. The surface of soaps are embedded with tiny red glass beads that trace the boundaries of the disjointed areas or cantons carved out of historic Palestine by the Oslo Agreement (1993) as the future Palestinian state. The transient nature of soap holds the promise of dissolving the inequitable borders and contrasts with the centuries old ancient tradition of soap-making preserved by Palestinians. Hatoum often employs puns in her titles and this piece is no exception. Her use of the term ‘tense’ relates to perpetual tension due to unresolved status of Palestinians. This state of affairs is also referenced through her choice to eliminate the word ‘perfect’ out of the grammatical term ‘present perfect tense’.

Hatoum's observation of the consequences of the Oslo agreement is also clearly articulated by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish who resigned from the Palestinian Liberation Organization executive committee in opposition to the Oslo agreement. His statement in this regard describes the current state of Palestinians as a result of the agreement: “…under the cover of an elusive peace process, to dispossess the Palestinians of their land and the source of their livelihood, and to restrict them to isolated reservations besieged by settlements and by-passes, until the day comes when, after consenting to end their demands and struggle, they are allowed to call their cages a state.” [11] Darwish has also used the title 'present tense' in his poem ‘The Butterfly's Burden’ decrying the still unresolved present:

Where is the road to the road?

And where are we, the marching on the footpath of the present

tense, where are we? Our talk a predicate

and a subject before the sea, and the elusive foam

of speech the dots on the letters,

wishing for the present tense a foothold

on the pavement ...[12]

Israel's unilateral redrawing of the map of the West Bank has resulted in the most inhumane living conditions in flagrant violation of international human rights treaties. Boundaries are set favoring expansion of Israeli settlements by a land grab policy whereby Palestinians are forced off their land, their homes destroyed and their movement restricted by eight meters high separation walls.

Since Present Tense (1996), Hatoum has created a number of projects incorporating hand-made maps, including the triptych in this exhibition, 3-D Cities (2008). In this installation, Hatoum spreads printed maps of Beirut, Baghdad and Kabul on three wooden tables linked by wooden trestles. Circular sections of the maps are delicately incised into cone shapes that protrude above or recede below the surface. A dialectic is created by domes above the map’s surface, signifying construction, and the hollow recesses, suggestive of craters left after explosions as a result of car bombs and aerial bombardment. This dialectic of positive and negative serves as a metaphor for the paradoxical state of construction and destruction, or life and death. A similar dialectic is explored in + and – (1994), in which a rotating arm draws and then erases circular lines in sand.

The positive/ negative relationship in 3 D Cities is recreated again in Afghan (red and orange 2008), the rug’s woven pile was unraveled to produce the shape of the Gall-Peters equal-area projection of the world map. The woven areas contrast with the negative spaces that create the map. The map redraws the continents according to real proportions in contrast to the popular maps drawn from a Euro-centric perspective where Northern countries are deemed larger than those in the Southern hemisphere. Afghan has a biographical reference to Hatoum's childhood memories of home and exile. Hatoum's father was an avid collector of Persian carpets and had amassed a large collection at their home in Haifa. Unable to return home in 1948, only part of the collection was salvage by his mother who managed to make a final trip before the borders were closed off. The salvaged rugs covered the floor of Hatoum's home in Beirut. Hatoum remembers her favorite rug and its grid formation: “The carpet I used for this work is an almost identical but smaller version of a carpet that lay on the floor of the bedroom I shared with my sisters in our Beirut home. It has a typical Bukhara pattern of small hexagonal medallions with a navy blue outline in a grid formation on a brown background. I sometimes think that my love for grid and geometric structures must have originated from the countless hours I, as a child, had spent playing on that carpet.” [13]

Loss of home, its content along with land and country leads to themes of exile or 'ghorba' in Arabic which is an uncomfortably familiar state of being for the majority of Arabs. Few have been unaffected by exile either personally or through separation from loved ones. Edward Said speaks for millions of Arabs who find themselves in state of limbo: “ Just beyond the frontier between ‘us’ and the ‘outsiders’ is the perilous territory of not-belonging: this is to where in a primitive time peoples were banished, and where in the modern era immense aggregates of humanity loiter as refugees and displaced persons…”[14]

Hatoum examines the manifestation of exilic life in her autobiographical video Measures of Distance (1988). The artist took photo stills of her mother inside the shower at their home in Beirut onto which she superimposes letters written in Arabic by her mother. The writing thus serves as a screen, which blurs her mother’s nakedness. The video’s sound track intersperses an audio of intimate conversations between Hatoum and her mother on the subject of sexuality along with Hatoum reading letters written to her by her mother in English. The video was shot by the artist on a visit to Beirut during a brief reprieve in Lebanon’s merciless civil war (1975-1991); both mother and daughter are aware that shelling may start any time, the impending danger that looms outside contrasts with the relaxed atmosphere inside.

The work’s metaphors are multi-layered and biographical. Although deeply personal it can also be read as a feminist critique of the portrayal of women in Western cultures and the taboos on subjects of sexual nature in Arab cultures. Despite the subtle reference to the Western Orientalist’s voyeuristic gaze, the viewer is obliged to concentrate on the intimate exchange between mother and daughter that  invalidates the objectification of the female body. Certainly, it is not surprising that Hatoum chose the bath as a site for intimacy. Baths, whether private or public women’s baths 'hammams', are spaces where one sheds clothes as well as inhibitions, and women share private stories, gossip, jokes and other intimate conversations. Within the privacy of her own bath, Hatoum’s mother’s naked body can be represented in its naturalness. The intimacy of this relationship is further magnified through language; the letters imposed on Hatoum’s mother’s naked body imply the distance and precious time lost in exile. The horizontal lines of the Arabic script denote the classical form of Arabic language which contrasts with the fluid colloquial conversation interspersed with laughter. The lines of script form both a curtain of separation and a protective shield for the daughter in her exile and the mother at home. Themes of exile and separation echo throughout the film; the physical absence of the daughter, the letters and the English voice-over are all reminders of distance. The English reading is detached and monotonous there is a feeling of disorientation as if the true meaning is lost in the translation.

Hatoum’s piece Hanging Garden from 2008 is also a poetic reminder of personal and collective tragedies of displacement and exile. In this recent work, Hatoum fills burlap sacks filled with Jordanian soil and covers them with sprouting grass that smells of damp fertile earth. In doing so, she is creating a barricade structure that simultaneously references life and death. For viewers who have witnessed any one of the region’s ten wars in the last sixty years, the imposing installation evokes a sense of impending danger, powerlessness and vulnerability.  The stalks of green grass signify the pervasive presence of barricades in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon where over time they become covered in grass. Yet the rough burlap material also contrasts the soft grass that symbolizes the persistence of life and nature’s ignorance of constructed barriers.

Gardens also carry a historical reference to exile. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven ancient wonders of the world, were built in 600BC by King Nebuchadnezzar II for his homesick wife to create the green landscape of her homeland. This reference contains particular significance to contemporary Jordan where homesick Iraqi refugees numbered 481,000 in 2007.[15] For the Iraqi stateless refugees Hanging Garden suggest optimism in the face of death and destruction. However the reality is that even their dreams of Babylon are made of foreign soil and building Baghdad is as elusive as the archeologists’ dream of discovering Babylon.

A similar theme of unfulfilled dreams is implied in one of Hatoum’s earlier work Every door a wall (2003) in which a newspaper article printed on a translucent curtain reports the capture of illegal workers smuggled over Mexican border into the United States.  Hiding for long hours in the suffocating bellies of trucks, the workers are discovered by the border guards with x-ray technology, which reduces the human figures to traces or shadows. The work brings to mind Ghassan Kanafani’s novel ‘Men in the Sun,’ which deals with the tragic death of three Palestinian men. Exiled from their homeland without official travel documents, the men attempt to cross the border into Iraq seeking work in neighboring oil-rich Kuwait. As the truck crosses the border, the stifling heat suffocates the men and their desperate cries for help are unheard. The story is a metaphor for the social and political obstacles faced by Palestinians in their struggle for freedom.  Although worlds apart, the Mexicans and Palestinians face death in pursuit of the basic human need to survive.

The muted voice of the Arab East is also invoked in the piece Set in stone (2002), yet this time in relation to the West Inspired by toy telephone fashioned by children from discarded tin cans, Hatoum reproduces the rudimentary phone in the shape of styrofone cups sculpted in white marble. In the fashion of tombstone engravings, Hatoum carves the words East and West (in Arabic) on each cup in the fashion. A hemp yarn connecting the two marble cups lies limp, a metaphor for untenable communication between East and West.

Medals and Memorials

Since the early 1980s, subjects dealt with in her work were harbingers of the new world order and its outcome: military interventions; occupations that have led to increased displacement and exile; poverty that has lead to vulnerability and instability; the erosion of civil liberties and human rights that has lead to insecurity and threat; environmental disasters: surveillance; and the rise of repressive regimes. Medal of dishonour (2008), installed in one of the gallery’s alcoves, epitomizes these issues in one small bronze medal in which the globe is in the shape of a hand-grenade.  The medal’s surface is engraved with the continents’ landmass dwarfed by a prominent map grid. The phrase “Made in the United States,” usually imprinted on the back of manufactured products, is inscribed on the medal’s surface in Arabic. The piece is a satirical reference to America’s global ambitions and accompanying failures. The Arabic script, combined with the title, imply America’s failure to win the hearts and minds of the Arab people and the consequences of its policies in the region, which have resulted in loss of life and millions of stateless refugees.

Witness (2008) also deals with the subject of memorials and medals and how their meaning changes through time. Witness was produced in collaboration with Iraq al Amir Women Cooperative Society, is a 70 cm high ceramic version of the Martyrs’ Monument in central Beirut. The original statue, erected in 1916, commemorates the Lebanese uprising against the Ottoman Authorities. The revolt resulted in the execution of several Lebanese nationalists in today’s Martyrs' Square. Despite its original commemorative role, the Martyr’s has assumed new meaning in contemporary Lebanon. The monument’s current bullet ridden body and broken arm, damage accrued during the Lebanese civil war, has been intentionally left un-restored so that the scars stand testimony to the monument’s role as a witness to the civil war. Interestingly enough, the etymology of the title is in its Arabic root word for martyr ‘shahid’ which also means ‘shahida’ or to witness Most recently, the monument has taken on an even more layered symbolism as Beirut Martyrs’ Square becomes the site of frequent demonstrations and protests by rival political parties who take turns in appropriating the space to their own causes. By placing a fragile replica of the Matryr’s Monument inside the space of the gallery, Hatoum interrogates the premise of shared national values often ascribed to the Monument and questions their assumed permanence throughout times of change.

Hatoum's work succeeds in communicating the state of living in a region fraught with

war and conflicts. Her exhibition in Amman offered the viewers not only new forms of art but also new ways of experiencing art. On June 28, 2008 Hatoum received an honorary doctorate from the American University of Beirut along with Palestinian legislator and academic Hanan Ashrawi. In her acceptance speech, Ashrawi eloquently elucidated several issues raised by Hatoum’s work and highlighted in this essay: “In Palestine (as in Lebanon and other stricken lands), when the public space becomes constricted and opaque and the discourse of deception prevails, and when power constructs supersede human/humane considerations, we need the courage to intervene before inaction becomes complicity and acquiescence turns to defeat.  For we are required to dismantle not only illegal settlements but also coercive constructs of mental and physical intimidation; to challenge not only the confines of prison cells and checkpoints, but also the blockade of ignorance and abuse … Unless we agitate, dear friends, we will not be able to provide our children (and grandchildren) with that rare gift of a future of tolerance and tranquility."[16]

Ashwai’s words underline the ways in which Hatoum’s work ‘agitates’ viewers and provokes them to ask more questions. The ‘states of being’ is about crossing over to Hatoum’s world and letting down our guard in order to experience her work with our body, mind, and soul while at the same time being aware that meaning is multi-layered and worth the challenging journey. I have seen Hatoum’s work in many settings around the world: San Francisco, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Venice, Jerusalem, and Sharjah. In Amman the immediacy of the experience is so poignant that the sense of the personal and universal is one; at Darat al Funun Hatoum’s art work achieved what Manzoni described as the “germ of total humanity.”  Decades from now, when future generations view Mona Hatoum’s work, it will still be the human condition as a consequence of man’s actions in her lifetime that will continue to convey with equal poignancy the scars we left on this earth. 

Notes

[1] Piero Manzoni, ‘For the Discovery of Zone of Images, 1957’, in Mona Hatoum, ed. Michael Archer, Guy Brett, Catherine de Zegher, Phaidon Press, London, 1997, p. 108.

[2] The works in this exhibition were made in Amman, Cairo, Berlin, Rochefort (France), Pietra Santa (Italy), London, Munich, New York, and Vancouver.

[3]Amelia Jones, ‘Body’ in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003, p.264.

[4] Cut-out tissue paper in repetitive patterns are traditional Mexican decorative banners used on several festive occasions, the works bears relation to the “Day of the Dead” festival banners when on the second day of this event colored tissue paper is replaced with black and white cut-outs representing the arrival of the animas (souls of the dead) and the departure of the angels. For Mexicans this annual event is not a day of mourning but rather a celebration of life and an occasion to honor the dead.

[5] Control Processes is defined by anthropologist Laura Nader as a process of control that emphasize the importance of ideas as dynamic components of power penetrating every aspect of our lives through institutions that influence people to participate in their own domination, resulting in control.

[6] Abdelrahman Munif, The Trench (Al-ukhdud,1985), translated by Peter Theroux, Pantheon Book, London  1991.

[7] Abdelrahman Munif, Thakera lil mustaqbal, Beirut, al-muassa a Arabeyyah lil dirasat wa al-nashir,  2003.

[8] Dessa Philippi, Do Not Touch in Mona Hatoum, Arnolfini, Bristol, 1993. 

[9] Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, trans. by Marjolijn de Jager, University of Virginia Press, 1992.

[10] Edward Said, ‘The Art of Displacement: Mona Hatoum’s Logic of Irreconcilables’ in Mona Hatoum: The Entire World as a Foreign Land, ed. Sheena Wagstaf, Tate Gallery, London, 2000.

[11] Mahmoud Darwish, Not to Begin at the End, Al-Ahram Weekly, Cairo, issue No 533, 10 - 16 May 2001.

[12] Mahmoud Darwish, A Noun Sentence in ‘The Butterfly's Burden’ (2007) translated by Fady Joudah,   Washington, USA, Copper Canyon Press, 2007.

[13] From an artist’s statement regarding Bukhara (Brown) 2007 a work exhibited in Never-Part in conjunction with Masarat Palestinian Festival at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium, Oct 19 – Nov 11, 2008.  

[14] Edward Said, Reflections on Exile, 1984 in Mona Hatoum, ed. Michael Archer, Guy Brett, Catherine de Zegher, Phaidon Press, London, 1997, p. 110.

[15] The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees: http://www.unhcr.org/cgi, accessed Sept. 14, 2008-

[16] http://www.aub.edu.lb/news/archive/preview.php?id=84960n , accessed Sept. 30, 2008.