Mona Hatoum. Close Quarters

About

Alongside the exhibition Love Letters in War and Peace the MSK presents an installation by Mona Hatoum. As much as the exhibition demonstrates the essence of art in messages of desire and affection between loved ones, Close Quarters (2014) addresses the complexity of relation. Hatoum’s installation includes earlier works, such as Incommunicado (1993), Quarters (1996), Grater Divide (2002), Nature Morte with Grenades (2006-7), and Daybed (2008). Mainly consisting of a large metal paravent and iron beds, sometimes shaped as household tools, such as a grader, the collection of works can be read as referring to the cycle of life, the bed being the space of intimacy, love, sleep, sexuality, birth, disease and death—of calm and peace but also of violence and war. Seen together, the works in Close Quarters allude to lives in a homely and safe environment as well as to lives spent in conflict zones, hospital and imprisonment, as can be sensed from the glass grenades strewn on the floor and the slowly, almost imperceptibly, turning barbed wire in 5RPM (2008) that closes off the entrance to the installation. 

The daughter of Palestinian exiles in Lebanon, and since the outbreak of the war in 1975, herself an exile in London, where she has lived since, Hatoum had to recollect herself, to reconceive herself through a set of fragile dependencies as so-called “subject matter out of place.” Only by recollection could she adapt to her losses, estranged as she was from tradition at the crossroads of dispossession. Living in a centre of the bohemia diaspora, she began her career making visceral performance art in the 1980s that focused with great intensity on politics and on the body, and touched on the realities of war, violence, exile, imperialism, and racism. Conceived in a transgressive relationship to the ethnic and gender dictates of society, her aesthetic and political oeuvre uses an array of mediums, from installation to sculpture, video, photography and works on paper. Since the beginning of the 1990s, her work moved increasingly away from a defiant language of performance towards large-scale installations that aimed to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and abjection, fear and fascination.