Mona Hatoum
Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, France
Dozens of fist-sized, candy-coloured crystal baubles are scattered on a stainless steel cart that would be equally at home in either a designer kitchen or a morgue. As alluring as gems tossed on a grey velvet jewellery display pad, Mona Hatoum’s Nature morte aux grenades (Still life with grenades, 2006-7), sets up the contradictions that structure this exhibition the minute you walk through the door. This is Palestinian-born Hatoum’s first solo outing in Paris in over a decade and here she treads familiarly fraught territory, revisiting the frontier between seduction and repulsion, security and danger, belonging and estrangement in works that from 2005 to the present.
Mobile Home (2005) encapsulates all of these issues in a single installation. Wire clotheslines, onto which various domestic objects, toys and furnishings have been attached, are strung between the top and bottom frames of two galvanized steel street barricades. A motorized pulley system moves the items back and forth in an incessant, absurd journey from one impenetrable boundary to another. There is no way into the circumscribed space and no way out. The electrical humming may come from the motor or the wires, but who wants to touch them and take the risk? In another room, one feels time inexorably pass as grass sprouts from a stacked wall of sandbags (Jardin suspendu, Hanging Garden, 2008).
Hatoum frequently reworks emblems that the West associates with the Arab world, simultaneously personalizing them and confronting us with our prejudices and clichés. Hatoum’s brass cut-out Misbah (2006) – the title means ‘lantern’ in Arabic – spins and sets illuminated stars and soldiers into motion on the walls of a darkened room. Kiffieh II (2007), a silk organza version of the black and white headdress immortalized by Yasser Arafat (and now standard fare on the high street), is embroidered with gun-metal grey cannetille thread in a motif that resembles chicken-wire. Bukhara (Red and White, 2007) is a Persian carpet akin to those that furnished the artist’s childhood home. Bits of the weave have been hand-plucked from the rug to form the Gall-Peters equal-area projection of the world map, which rescales the continents according to their true proportions.
While the themes, and even some of the forms, in this show recur in Hatoum’s practice, there is nonetheless an operative displacement here. In lieu of grand gestures of the monumental-utensil sort (as with her menacing Mouli-Julienne x 21 from 1999), Hatoum turns toward slighter things, which gain in force through a process of accretion. Wax-paper frottages of a box grater, tea strainer, and Indian colander (Untitled, 2008), hang alongside small white cardboard take-out food trays whose grease stains have been traced with ink (Clouds, 2007). Across the gallery, tissue paper cut-outs present the repetitive patterns of toy soldiers, stars and skulls (Untitled Cut-Outs, 2008). All of these could be read as the products of busy work, child’s play, or activities contrived to stave off boredom while travelling or waiting: two primary conditions of exile.
Vivian Rehberg
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