Home,
Displacement and the Body
Mona Hatoum at Tate Modern | London
Farniyaz Zaker is a multi-media artist. She holds a Doctorate of Philosophy (Fine
Art) from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (St John’s College).
Located between architectural theory and gender studies, her art-practice and
writing largely deal with the nexus of body, society and place.
The exhibition of the British-Palestinian artist, Mona Hatoum, at Tate Modern draws on thirty-five years of her
practice, and is her first major survey in the UK. The show consists of a body
of work that brings together distinct themes with a variety of media, including
performance, sculpture, video, installation and photography. Issues such as the
body, displacement, migration, vulnerability and sexuality are at the heart of
her practice. In this review, I would like to single out three works by Hatoum: Measures of
Distance (1988), Light Sentence
(1992) and Undercurrent (red) (2008).
They are, in my opinion, among her best works, cleverly uniting the themes of
home, displacement, and the body.
For many of us, one of the most powerful dwelling places we hold in
our memory – and a place that we occasionally revisit in our mind – is our
childhood house. Gaston Bachelard has analysed the fusion of this memorised
image of one’s childhood house and that of one’s mother in his book The Poetics of Space. According to him,
‘protectiveness’ and ‘resistance’ are the two essential qualities of both the physical
and the imaginary house.[1] This
is reflected in Mona Hatoum’s work as well. She, too,
revisits and reconstructs this place in her practice. The house and homeland in
Hatoum's work, however, usually lack the qualities of
protectiveness and resistance. Born into a Palestinian family in Beirut in 1952, and living in the UK since the outbreak of
the civil war in Lebanon in 1974, Hatoum has tended to portray home as something vulnerable
and transient.
The video installation Measures
of Distance (1988) consists of letters that Hatoum’s
mother wrote in Beirut to her daughter in London. The letters, which are mostly
describing the desolation caused by the separation of mother and daughter, are
being read aloud by Hatoum. Similar to many authors
and poets, including Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz (1877–1929) and Henri Bosco (1988-1976), for
whom the image of the house and that of the mother were inseparable, Hatoum’s Measures of
Distance evokes the fusion of the mother and the home. By merging naked
pictures of her mother with her letters, the work coalesces Hatoum’s
longing for her mother and for a place to call home into one whole. Unable of finding
a real home for herself, the exiled artist creates in this medley of words and
pictures of her mother a surrogate home. At the same time, the mother’s nudity
communicates vulnerability and transience. Bachelard describes previous
dwelling places as ‘psychological diagrams’, which can guide ‘writers and poets
in their analysis of intimacy.’[2]
Measures of Distance stages the body of
the mother as a dwelling place and as a ‘psychological diagram’ that guides Hatoum in her analysis of intimacy.
Light Sentence
(1992) is a room made of wire mesh lockers lit by a light bulb that is hanging
at the centre of the room. The light bulb is spinning, powered by an electric
motor that is hidden behind a fake ceiling. This continuous swaying lets the
shadows of the wire mesh lockers move along the walls of the gallery. This, in
turn, creates in the viewer a condition in which his/her visually perceived
movement disagrees with her/his vestibular system. As the result, the audience
feels vertigo and nausea – a condition commonly known as motion sickness. For
the spectator everything in the room moves: the wire mesh lockers, which are
representing a built environment, the light bulb, and the shadows. Even the
ground itself feels unsteady. The body is central to both Measures of Distance and Light
Sentence. The latter, however, uses the body to somatically convey the
frustration and trauma of displacement and migration.
The last piece I wish to highlight is also one of Hatoum’s later works. Undercurrent
(red) (2008) is a dramatic red woven carpet that covers the floor of the
last room of exhibition space. It is a strong evocation of a comforting home. At
a closer look, however, the viewer discerns that the carpet is made of red
electric cables that are closely woven into each other. Its fringes lead to light
bulbs that go on and off in a rhythmic manner. Again, the artist turns our
attention to the relationship between the human body and a place. The carpet is
not only a place and a home, but its red colour, vein-like threads, and
pulsating rhythm are reminiscent of an organic body.
At the end of the exhibition, the viewer feels a wistful longing
for a retreat, a childhood house, a dwelling place: ‘I say my mother and my
thoughts are of you, oh, House. House of the lovely dark summers of my
childhood.’[3]
Mona Hatoum is at Tate Modern, London,
from 4 May – 21 August.