Mona Hatoum, exhibition review: Striking, seductive and hard-hitting

The familiar takes on dark, strange meanings in this deeply personal and political retrospective of a hard-hitting, countercultural artist
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Ben Luke5 May 2016

Mona Hatoum’s Hot Spot is a cage-like globe in which the world’s landmasses are mapped out in fiery red neon. At each join the neon flickers, pulsing urgently. Like many works in Tate Modern’s retrospective of Hatoum’s five-decade long career you are seduced but you don’t want to get too close. Hatoum has used live electrical cables in other works and that scarlet neon suggests danger.

Hatoum is obsessed with maps — they’ve appeared regularly in her work since the mid-Nineties. She’s described them in tiny drawings using her own hair, or in grease stains on a fast-food tray, or in huge installations. Among the latter is Map, shown recently in Paris but sadly not in the Tate Modern version of this show, in which the globe was described on the floor in transparent glass marbles.

In all of these works the empirical facts of global geography are unstable, precarious. Hot Spot is clever because it takes a term used to describe areas of war or trauma and applies it to the whole globe. Every nation is implicated, every landmass on red alert. Hatoum made it a decade ago but it’s eternally relevant. Think only of the pressing issues of 2016: the Syrian civil war, the refugee crisis, or even Brexit. They show the instability of geography and borders and how events in “hot spots” affect everywhere else. Stare long enough at Hatoum’s globe and the neon lines on either side of the sphere melt into one another, redrawing the map, creating new continents, countries, islands.

Place and identity are crucial to understanding Hatoum’s work. She was born to Palestinian parents in Beirut in 1952 and came to Britain in 1975 just as the Lebanese civil war escalated. She could not return. At one point, rather bizarrely, she came to be linked to the Young British Artists movement. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1995, the same year as Damien Hirst, amid its mid-Nineties heyday. There, she showed Corps Étranger, a cylindrical booth with a screen on the floor featuring footage of a medical camera almost violently probing her body. It prompted a bit of a stink from reactionaries. A related work featured in Charles Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997.

Stare long enough at Hatoum’s globe and the neon lines melt into one another, redrawing the map

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But this YBA connection is a red herring. Other than sharing the same gallery, Jay Jopling’s White Cube, Hatoum has little to do with Hirst, Emin et al. She forged her artistic identity in the divided Britain of the late Seventies and early Eighties, connecting with a Leftist countercultural art scene which was dominated by performance and video art, feminism and identity politics.

This retrospective effectively shows that her career can be divided into two periods. At first she was predominantly a performance artist, identifying the revolutionary political potential of what was then a relatively new discipline. She created around 35 performances in the Eighties.

In 1989, though, she took a fellowship in Cardiff and her work shifted to sculpture and installation, informed by the reductive shapes and materials of American minimalism and the post-minimalism that deliberately sought to subvert it. Minimalism reduced everything to materials and the space around them; post-minimalism was messy and human. Hatoum continues this tradition: minimalist grids and cubes abound in her work but they’re imbued with maximum content, personal and political.

Intelligently, the show reflects the clear threads that run from the performance works to today. The performances survive in the form of Hatoum’s notes and sketches, and occasional videos. These punctuate the whole show, so you can see that ideas founded in the early works are carried through into sculptural form later.

Poignant: Measure of Distance, 1988 
Mona Hatoum

Hatoum is interested in discomfort, creating tense set-ups that disarm the viewer. The performances were more directly political than her more recent work, and engaged with issues in her new-found home as well as her native Lebanon.

In Roadworks, made in Brixton in 1985, the year of a major riot in the area, she walked around the streets barefoot, pulling a pair of Doc Martens attached by their laces to her ankles. At the time DMs were unmistakably connected both to the police and to skinhead culture. How you read her performance depended on your political persuasion.

Meanwhile, The Negotiating Table, made in 1983, was a literally visceral response to the Lebanese war and particularly the massacres of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982. Lying on a table, surrounded by empty chairs, Hatoum lay static, covered in animal entrails and red paint under plastic sheeting with a lone lightbulb above her. She was accompanied by a soundtrack of news reports and Western leaders’ speeches about peace.

Neon danger: Hot Spot, 2013
Dylan Martinez/Reuters

Hatoum occasionally dips into her autobiography, as in the poignant video installation Measures of Distance (1988), which overlays images of her mother in the shower with the elegant Arabic script of her mother’s letters. Hatoum reads the letters between them aloud. They movingly document the emotional warmth of a parent-child relationship and the pain of separation and exile, as well as the process of being photographed naked by her daughter: “I felt we were like sisters, close together and with nothing to hide from each other. I enjoyed the feeling of intimacy… ”

Other works allude to specific aspects of Palestinian culture. Present Tense (1996) consists of hundreds of cubic bars of Neblus soap, a traditional Palestinian product made from olive oil, bought from a market in the old city of Jerusalem. Hatoum has pressed red beads into the soap which look like embroidery — they outline the Palestinian territories defined by the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Hatoum conjures the issue — territory — but humanises it, too. This is about a people as well as land, about cultural traditions that are wedded to place. The soap also encourages us to think about individual bodies rather than a massed population.

Present Tense is quintessential Hatoum: striking, seductive materials gathered to make a hard-hitting message.

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Often there is a terrible beauty at work: in Impenetrable (2009), she alludes to the Venezuelan Jesus Rafael Soto’s Penetrables, wonderfully optical hanging sculptures-cum-installations. In Hatoum’s homage the kind of dangling threads used by Soto are violated: they’re made of barbed wire. The same visual pleasures are at play but the razor wire makes this suspended cube repellent as well as enticing.

This duality is central to Hatoum’s work. Comfortable everyday objects become menacing: beds, stripped to their frames, become weapons. Gathered in clusters, bunk beds becomes prisons. Domestic products are charged with lethal electrical wires or magnified to become menacing instruments of torture. Beautiful blown-glass objects resembling organs are trapped in steel cages.

Hatoum is a latter-day surrealist, imbuing the familiar with darker, stranger meanings. Like them, she can be funny and erotic, too. In Jardin Public, a triangle of hair is placed on the seat of a very bodily wrought-iron chair.

Hatoum has said she wants her installations to grab us physically, sensually, emotionally, and then prompt a search for meaning. They succeed abundantly: this show is at once captivating and unsettling.

Mona Hatoum is at Tate Modern, SE1 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk) until Aug 21

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