Mona Hatoum :: Artist Mona Hatoum Essays

Mona HatoumMost art scholars and critics examine the fly the coop of Mona Hatoum in sexual congress to her ethnic and geopolitically charged emphasize. In her own writings and interviews, however, Hatoum cautions against this journalistic approach. For her, the about important element of her art is its relationship to the soundbox. When Hatoum immigrated from the Middle East to England, she nowadays felt a sense of displacement when she perceived a head teacher/body disjunct that contradicted her own cultural experience it became immediately manifest to me that people were quite divorced from their bodies and very caught up in their heads, worry disembodied intellectuals. So I was always very insistent on the animal(prenominal) in my work (Hatoum/Brett, 59). We relate to the world through our senses. You head start experience an artwork animal(prenominal)lyMeanings, connotations and associations come after the initial physical imagination, intellect, psyche are fired off by what youve seen (Hatoum/Archer, 8).I urge on this statement against theory by performance scholar Nelly Richard The body is the physical agent of the structures of everyday experience. It is the transmitter of cultural messagesa repository of memories, an mover in the theatre of power, a tissue of affects and feelings. Because the body is at the limit point between biology and societyin terms of power, biography and history, it is the lay par excellence for transgressing the constraints of meaning (Richard, 208).Focusing on four works by Hatoum, I take a position that respects the artists own intent and uses the body as a starting point for analyzing her work. However, I argue that it is required to consider her background in relation to the content of her art it is because of her background as an exile from political violence that so much of Hatoums work evokes a sense of danger by eliciting a visceral response from the smasher. I also argue that Hatoums work insists that the viewer recognizes a routine body, the implicit body of the oppressed. That insistence comes primarily from two elements of her background her come up to experience of living in the shadow of oppression, and her experience with feminist groups as an art student in London. Thus, in Hatoums work, two bodies-the body of the viewer and an implicit body--engage in a dialectic.Necessarily then, I offer a brief glimpse into the background of Mona Hatoum. She is a Palestinian whose parents were exiled to Lebanon before she was born.