Mona Hatoum is a British-Palestinian creator who specializes in multimedia, installation, and performance art. Her works often depict an uncanny version of our own everyday reality and explores concepts like displacement, contradiction, conflict, and terror that are so normalized in our society.
Her career began in the 1980s and largely consisted of performance art, using her own body as her canvas and random pedestrians as her patrons. Much of this performance art centered around the political problems that affected her personally. Hatoum has used her skills to culminate a successful career as an artist and is recognized as one of the most influential female artists of this generation.
Being born in 1952 in Beirut, Lebanon, her Palestinian family had been displaced by the Israeli government just a few years before she was born. Due to the displacement in 1948, Hatoum grew up in Lebanon until she took a trip to London in 1975 where she would be forced to stay because of civil war breaking out in Lebanon. Her art piece, Measures of Distance created in 1988, depicts the impact of war on families. Measures of Distance is a video that includes photos of Mona’s mother, along with text from letters that her mother sent her during this time when they were separated. Hatoum has said that this work demonstrates the displacement, disorientation, and the tremendous sense of loss as a result of the separation caused by war.
While Measures of Distance is quite personal, Mona seems to have moved to more abstract themes that more people can relate to. Using everyday household appliances, furniture, and even the inside of her own body, Hatoum bridges the gap between feelings of comfort and disgust by creating sinister versions of the everyday objects that we are so used to bringing us comfort in our own homes. For example, Silence (1994) is a life-size crib made of glass that seems quite dangerous. Cribs are mostly thought of as a safe, nurturing space for growing babies to nap in, but Silence threatens that safe space and turns a piece of furniture into more of a weapon than a bed.
Silence (1994) - Jens Cederskjold (flickr.com)
Light Sentence (1992) is my personal favorite installation done by Mona Hatoum. It was constructed using 36 wire mesh compartments, an electric motor, and a light bulb, set up in a dark open room. In the middle of the room, the wire was arranged to imitate a prison cell and with a light bulb attached to an electric motor, the viewer was made to feel like they were entrapped inside the cell. The shadows and reflections from the light in the dark room seem to have made an eerie effect for all who experienced the installation live.
Light Sentence © Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. AM 2009-56 © Photo : Centre Pompidou, Mnam-CCI / Dist RMN-GP [Philippe Migeat]
As an artist who is motivated by politics, I am deeply inspired by the work Mona Hatoum has created throughout her life. Humanity may not be at its best right now, but using our talents and imaginations to get people to feel and think about these concepts is a powerful teacher.
Her powerful legacy continues to thrive and from artist to artist, I wish her all the best.