Mona Hatoum: Domestic Disturbance - Softcover

Site Santa Fe (Gallery); Massachusetts Museum Of Contemporary Art

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0970073844 ISBN 13: 9780970073846

Publisher: Storey Books, 2001

Synopsis

Mona Hatoum is recognized as one of the most significant figures in contemporary art. Her work addresses political conflict, the physical body, and feminist issues in a surrealistic style and with a minimalist aesthetic. This thought-provoking artist uses diverse methods and works in various media, including installation, video, sculpture, and performance art. This four-color catalog of her current exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams was edited by Laura Heon, MASS MoCA's Curator, and gracefully illuminates in words and pictures the Hatoum exhibition, which was at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico before coming to Massachusetts. The works in DOMESTIC DISTURBANCE revolve around Hatoum's continuing fascination with the everyday object, which she turns into something uncanny and often threatening. Kitchen utensils crackle with an audible, amplified electrical current in Sous Tension. The Baalbek Birdcage, a beautiful Victorian birdcage enlarged to the exact size of a prison cell at Alcatraz, represents the near-universal, feminine dread of a confining domestic life. La Grand Broyeuse (Mouli-Julienne x17) is an 18-foot-tall reproduction of an early, hand-operated "food processor," which the viewer quickly realizes could injure a human being. Also included, in sharp contrast, is a series of delicate rubbings on Japanese wax paper - faint, ghostly impressions, white on a white sheet - that Hatoum created during a residency at the Shaker community in Sabbath Day Lake, Maine, using beautiful handmade Shaker colanders and graters from the 1880s.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Born in the Lebanon, Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum was exiled to London, where she has lived and worked since the mid 1970s and where, in 1995, she was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. Through performance, video, sculpture and installation she creates architectonic spaces which relate to the body, language and the condition of exile. One of her most spellbinding and best known works is a video installation titled Corps etranger, where the spectator enters a small pavilion and takes a visual journey through all the orifices of the artist's body. Such works combine states of emotion and longing with the formal simplicity of Minimalism, creating powerful evocations of displacement, denial and otherness. Hatoum's many international exhibitions include the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris (1994); her work tours extensively to museums throughout the United States in 1997. The distinguished British critic Guy Brett, explores key themes around a sense of place, the body and communication which emerge from Hatoum's range of work. The artist describes a chronology of practice in conversation with Michael Archer, writer, curator and co-founder of London's Audio Arts sound archive. Catherine de Zegher makes a complex and provocative analysis of Recollection, a work she commissioned for a sixteenth-century beguinage. Hatoum has chosen a text by the influential Palestinian author Edward Said as well as a statement from the noted Italian post-war sculptor and performance artist, Piero Manzoni. The book also includes Hatoum's own notes, statements and previous interviews.

About the Author

Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut in 1952, to Palestinian parents. In 1975, she settled in London after civil war broke out in Lebanon while she was visiting Great Britain. She first became known in the early 1980s for a series of performances and video pieces that focused with great intensity on the human body. Since the early 1990s, her work has shifted toward installation and sculpture.

This catalog accompanies the exhibition Mona Hatoum: Domestic Disturbance, organized by MASS MoCA with SITE Santa Fe. It was presented at SITE Santa Fe from October 7, 2000 to January 14, 2001, and at MASS MoCA from March 18 to November 15, 2001.

About this edition

• Publisher: Storey Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0970073844
• ISBN 13: 9780970073846
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 76
• Editor: Hatoum Mona, Heon Laura Steward