Mona Hatoum :: Artist Mona Hatoum Essays

Mona HatoumMost art scholars and critics examine the work of Mona Hatoum in relation to her ethnic and geopolitically charged background. In her own writings and interviews, however, Hatoum cautions against this journalistic approach. For her, the most important element of her art is its relationship to the body. When Hatoum immigrated from the Middle East to England, she immediately felt a sense of rendering when she perceived a mind/body disjunct that contradicted her own cultural experience it became immediately apparent to me that people were quite divorced from their bodies and very caught up in their heads, like disembodied intellectuals. So I was always very insistent on the physical in my work (Hatoum/Brett, 59). We relate to the world by means of our senses. You first experience an artwork physicallyMeanings, connotations and associations come after the initial physical imagination, intellect, psyche are fired off by what youve seen (Hatoum/Archer, 8).I study this stateme nt against theory by performance scholar Nelly Richard The body is the physical agent of the structures of everyday experience. It is the transmitter of cultural messagesa repository of memories, an actor in the theatre of power, a tissue of affects and feelings. Because the body is at the boundary between biology and societyin terms of power, biography and history, it is the site par excellence for transgressing the constraints of meaning (Richard, 208). nidus on four works by Hatoum, I take a position that respects the artists own intent and uses the body as a outset point for analyzing her work. However, I argue that it is necessary to consider her background in relation to the content of her art it is because of her background as an exile from political delirium that so much of Hatoums work evokes a sense of danger by eliciting a visceral response from the smasher. I also argue that Hatoums work insists that the viewer recognizes a second body, the implicit body of the oppress ed. That insistence comes primarily from two elements of her background her direct experience of living in the shadow of oppression, and her experience with feminist groups as an art student in London. Thus, in Hatoums work, two bodies-the body of the viewer and an implicit body--engage in a dialectic.Necessarily then, I offer a brief glimpse into the background of Mona Hatoum. She is a Palestinian whose parents were exiled to Lebanon before she was born.