Mona Hatoum

Interviewed by Gray Watson.

In this interview Hatoum makes reference to the importance of her Lebanese background and goes on to discuss several works including 'Light Sentence' shown at the Serpentine Gallery in 1993.

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 13 Number 4, 1993

Transcript

An underlying concern in Mona Hatoum's work is the role of autobiography, identity and 'the refraction of exile and displacement.' In this interview she makes reference to the importance of her Lebanese background and goes in to discuss several works including 'Light Sentence' shown at the Serpentine Gallery in 1993, and also 'Measures of Distance' and 'Plus and Minus' also shown in that year at the Arnolfini Gallery.

Gray Watson: I'm about to interview Mona Hartoum who has recently shown an installation at the Serpentine Gallery in London entitled Light Sentence and a replica of it is shown, as part of a much larger solo exhibition of her work at the Arnolfini in Bristol - of which a larger single piece is an installation called 'Plus or Minus.' But to begin with Mona, could you describe Light Sentence?

Mona Hartoum: Okay. Light Sentence is an installation in which I use wire-mesh lockers, which are placed in a U-shape enclosure within a room with a light bulb. The only light source in the room is a single light bulb that hangs from a wire and it moves very, very slowly up and down. I'll talk about how this piece came about. I was actually looking for some furniture in a catalogue and I identified this wire-mesh locker. I immediately could see the associative potential of this locker because it looked more like a little animal cage that you would see in a lab or a chicken factory. It also looked like an architectural model of a skyscraper. The light bulb emphasises the architectural element of the work by projecting the shadows onto the surrounding walls. Not only did it create a sort of feeling of the whole room becoming like a cage in which you become enmeshed, but also this feeling that, because the light bulb is moving very, very slowly, there's a feeling of displacement, disorientation that's created by the simple movement of the light, which shifts the ground under your feet and gives you an uneasy feeling when you enter the space, that something is not quite right. I feel that it's very meditative, poetic and beautiful because there are shadows on the walls. Of course, the wire-mesh lockers are very rigid and solid but the shadows become very liquid and fluid and very beautiful to watch, just going up and down on the wall.

GW: Now 'Plus or Minus' is a much bigger installation. Could you briefly describe that?

MH: The main space downstairs at the Arnolfini has one continuous wall which is about forty feet long and which I clad entirely with sheets of metal from floor to ceiling. And at a right angle to the wall there are two columns with glass sheets going from the floor to the ceiling. From a distance, when you walk into the space, you see a regular pattern of little rectangles, which look like a drawing, maybe a flat drawing on the metal wall which is repeated on the glass wall. When you come close to it you realize that they are little things stuck on the surface and they have a very funny, fuzzy texture. They are actually made with iron filings clustering around magnets that are stuck onto the surface very regularly in a grid form. So, from a distance it looks like a nice clean drawing, but when you come very close these things stuck on start looking like little creepy animals or some sort of virus or mushrooms that have grown onto the surface and they are no longer those nice clean surfaces that you expect.

GW: Now I know that throughout your career you've used different media and different styles and that is still the case, but, speaking very generally there does seem to be a shift of emphasis away from more literal figurative and referential imagery towards a cooler more abstract, more elegant and more spare look. Do you think that's fair and if so, why do you think it is?

MH: In my recent work I think the material that I'm dealing with is still very much the same but the physical embodiment of it has become maybe more sophisticated and more precise; exploring the enjoyment of materials and the phenomenology of these materials. I feel as though I don't have to tell the whole very complicated story in every piece of work. For me, a work has to function on different levels. What I'm always aiming for in my work is to maybe create a situation which involves the viewer in some way. Maybe just a situation which seduces you or engages you in some way physically on a very basic level. The questions come afterwards.

GW: Well, there were several associations in Plus or Minus and the most obvious one to me, in the title especially, given the presence of iron filings on magnets, was electromagnetism.

MH: Maybe if I, if I tell you of some of the titles that I was about to use like, the working title for it was ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’.

GW: Somewhat different.

MH: Absolutely, and it was just the working title. The other one was 'Viral statistics’, as opposed to ‘Vital Statistics.' Another one was 'Pole to Pole,' because there were two columns. I was trying to work with this idea of something, which is very regimented and organized but at the same time invasive and something that we can't control which has invaded or infested an area.

GW: It's interesting that you speak in terms of infestation. I must say I didn't pick that up in Bristol. But, I was very struck by another piece, what were in effect two wire chairs upstairs, an untitled piece. Two wire grid-like structures looking like very simple chairs one very much larger than the other, and obviously in some sort of relationship with each other. Also a very recent work, a work still in progress, which you've just showed me in your studio which includes a pair of swings called a Couple of Swings. But again there's this coupling, having things in twos. You were saying that you felt it might be dealing with relationships; and in the same breath, which I hadn't thought of at all, you mentioned AIDS, and said that that might be one of the associations.

MH: Well, if I go back to the wire chairs, which look very cage-like: it's two chairs, one is an adult chair and one is a child's chair. So, you immediately have these sorts of relationships of small and large, maybe mother and child or father and child but there's sort of entrapment of the two, being made of wire-mesh, like cages. There's something very harsh about them because they are very angular and very cold. But at the same time there's something very touching and sweet about them. I really like to explore and move people in different directions at the same time, maybe a positive and a negative: or, something cold and uncaring and at the same time warm and caring, as in the case of the two chairs. I always like to explore opposites in every piece of work. A piece could be very seductive and at the same time very repulsive. Why did I mention AIDS? I feel it's very much a part of our language today and it's responsible for a lot of the body art that's happening at the moment. But it's also responsible for making us realize how vulnerable we are. And this combination of thinking about the amorous body and the diseased body in one image is something that I find quite weird and scary and strange at the same time. So, the two swings for me, I called them A Couple of Swings, because they're two fragile swings, because they're made of glass, and if they swung towards each other they can smash each other. They can touch each other but they can smash each other at the same time. So that's why I'm sort of talking about that sort of vulnerability, whether it's to do with AIDS or any kind of vulnerability. But with any type of closeness you can smash each other as well, so it's not necessarily just to do with AIDS.

GW: Could we talk a little about the way in which you would like your work to function on the spectator? Now using these much sparer systems, do you feel that it's going to be working in a different way on the people who receive it?

MH: The unconscious is unavoidable because, my social condition as a woman from a distant culture, with all the influences and all the experiences that I grew up with in Lebanon, has formed my unconscious. The older I get the more I realize that a lot of my work actually makes reference to a couple of incidents that happened to me as a child, which were obviously directly related to the conflicts I was growing up with the threat of war and all that stuff around me. Now, although for a long time I felt that I was making very clear and specific political statements, the emphasis in those works related completely to those incidents.

GW: There was another small piece in your show at Bristol called Incommunicado which was a strange little structure, also quite cage-like in a sense. It reminded me slightly of a hospital trolley, or cot, or something like that.

MH: It is actually a hospital cot. It's called Bare Metal Hospital Cot and the frame is very prison-like. It's got bars.

GW: You mean it's actually a readymade.

MH: It's actually a ready-made, which I ordered with my own specifications. To me it speaks very much of child abuse but I called it Incommunicado because I feel that when a child is in that situation they do not have the language and the ability to communicate the pain and the terror they're going through. But I also feel that even an adult can go through terrifying experiences of pain or abuse without a language to articulate it. You turn into a little infant who is unable to articulate. Because in the normative pain, for me, is contained within the boundaries of the body and remains private and incommunicable.

GW: I was wondering in particular about your tape, Measures of Distance which, when I was watching it, even though I didn't catch every word, even in the English translation, because it's got an Arabic soundtrack and also an English soundtrack which are sort of overlaid, the English translating the Arabic, even though I didn't catch it all, it seemed to be extremely painful and was dealing with a very personal situation of communication, particularly between yourself and your mother, and I wondered whether in fact it was a very painful thing to make?

MH: In this work I made a conscious decision to deal with the personal. To tell my story which is very complex based on a series of letters from my mother to me. My mother still lives in Beirut and I live in London and the distance between us was caused by the war in Lebanon. And although it's based on the relationship between mother and daughter it also speaks of loss and disorientation and exile and it becomes like a portrait of a person who's trying to make sense of the refractions of exile and displacement; trying to reconstruct an identity for herself out of all those discontinuities.