Continental Drift (Iron filings on clear, lighted plastic)
Mona Hatoum
The Entire World as a Foreign Land
Tate Britain, 2000
***
22-year-old Beirut-born Mona Hatoum was on a trip to London in 1975 when civil war broke out in her home country. She was unable to return to Lebanon until the war ended – 15 years later – and was forced to live in the UK as an exile.
During her time in London, Hatoum trained at the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. Today, she is one of the world’s most intriguing contemporary artists, her work mainly falling under the category of kinetic – or moveable - art. Her mediums range from installations and sculpture to video, photography, and works on paper.
Her career has been characterized by displacement. Her art career began in the ‘80s with performance art, much of which focused intently on the body. Since then, she has concentrated on creating larger-scale installations with the goal of engaging viewers in conflicting emotions: Desire and revulsion, fear and fascination, intrigue and disgust. Her sculptures take familiar, everyday objects and transform them into foreign, threatening, and dangerous devices.
Much of her work also focuses on the earth and world as a disconnected, foreign place. In 2000, her work The Entire World as a Foreign Land was at the inaugural launch of the Tate Britain. The title is based on a conversation she had with literary theorist Edward Said, who said, “The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons.”
Hatoum explores notions of the relationship between individual identity and cultural or geographic identity, as well as feelings of – or feelings in hostility to – belonging.
–Ariel Goldberg