Collaboration with Mona Hatoum
Mona Hatoum Biography
- Born in 1952 in Beirut Lebanon to a Palestinian family.
- Makes distinction on Palestinian because her family (and most Palestinians) were exiles in Lebanon after 1948, and were unable to obtain Lebanese ID cards
- religious based tensions
- Living and working in London since 1975
- Brief visit to London left Hatoum stranded there once the civil war broke out
- even though London has been 'home' for over 40 years it still isn't really 'home'
- Always wanted to be an artist, Father worked at the British embassy in Lebanon, his British connections made her trip to London possible
- Studied at Byam Shaw School of Art, then the Slade
- a time where she could walk down the street unnoticed without being stared at or have people prying into her business
- both wonderful and horrible time. She could experience art school and life freely, but also was torn and separated from her home and life as she had known it
Artist's Work/ Contributions
works with installation, performance, video
Explores relationship of politics and individual through performance
Makes the familiar uncanny
Methodology
- views a lot of her work as luck, or by chance. When people say she's worked so hard she disagrees, and considers herself lucky
Key Works
Hot Spot - referring to places of military or civil unrest, red neon highlights the whole globe as a 'danger zone, constantly caught up in conflict and unrest
Measures of Distance - highlights the intimate relationship of mother and daughter alongside exile, displacement, disorientation, and loss as the result of war
Grater Divider - transforms an everyday object into something menacing and threatening through enlarging
Light Sentence - wire mesh lockers lit up by a slow-moving light bulb, creating a constant unsettling shift in the shadows projected onto the wall
I am interested in Rubber Mat and Pin Rug the movement in these lines
- also Hatoum's comments on her identity
- best she can do is describe herself as a mixture, while she was raised Palestinian Catholic, she identified more with Lebanon and went to French schools
- always the expectation that as a marginalized person she should be speaking for or representing the people, and she tries to contradict that because speaking for everyone is a heavy task
Rubber Mat reminds me of the line drawings in the margin of my notebook I have done since I was young, I would like to draw these on a larger scale than my past attempts translating it through printmaking
With Pin Rug I think of the ways I attempt to enforce boundaries and constantly find people crossing them, like the display in the niche gallery and someone touching the braid. With something like a rug, people want it to be soft, they want to rub their feet on it, but would never consider it on a mat made of pins. I would like to experiment with making things that are normally welcoming and inviting into hostile unwelcoming objects.
Self Reflections
Born in 1997 in Winnipeg, raised in Regina
Mom is white, dad is black, separated when I was young, so I have a complete disconnect with the paternal side of my family
Disconnect with my half-sister, little to no opportunity to get to know her when we were younger, other people made the decisions for us to not be introduced
I identify as mixed, and I'm always faced with questions about my ethnicity, what am I, and people wanting me to label myself for their understanding and convenience
I've spent my whole life being told that I am not black enough, or white enough
I often find myself trying to make sure I have all the answers before I begin working, and I'd like to follow Hatoum's methodology of just working with what I feel at the moment, whether I have the answers on the final product or not
Bibliography
Mona Hatoum, Phaidon Press, 1997.
https://www.whitecube.com/artists/artist/mona_hatoum
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/mona-hatoum-2365/who-is-mona-hatoum
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/mona-hatoum/
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