With skin and hair
Attention! Who enters the world of Mona Hatoum, can not rely on anything. Dangers lurk even in your own home. Kitchens are under heavy current, cribs have slats made of cutting wire, child swings bear razor-sharp edges, and kitchen sieves threaten with metal spines. At first glance, the objects were attractive in their shiny design, recognizable at second glance: they are weapons. "I play with expectations, then I destroy them," commented Mona Hatoum.
At the beginning of the eighties, the now 54-year-old shocked the art scene for the first time. She put herself in a body bag and lay down on a table, covered with blood and intestines. For this she played for hours from media reports on the war between Israel and Lebanon. In Palestinian refugee camps hundreds died in massacres? Hatoum's performance was her way of answering. Threat, violence and exile are next to "femininity and domesticity" the themes of the artist. They are indispensable to their own history.
In 1952, Mona Hatoum was born in Lebanon. Her parents, Palestinian refugees, had fled Israel four years earlier. In the new home they are not welcome. They feel alien, just like their daughter many years later in exile. The 23-year-old is on vacation in London when civil war broke out in 1975 in Lebanon. The Beirut airport is closed, she can not go back. Cut off from her family, she stays in London, gets on with jobs and fights for a place at the Slade School of Art.
The themes of Mona Hatoum: femininity, strangeness, violence
She always wanted to be an artist. Already as a student, she had bought her first art book: René Magritte. Mona Hatoum feels like an outsider. "My hair was wild then, my voice loud, hands waving." The English had seemed to them as if they were trapped in their heads like "disembodied intellects". But she's adjusted by now, she says.
For a long time, Hatoum has been married to Canadian musician Jerry Collins, taming his curly hair into a hairstyle. Nevertheless, the feeling of homelessness remains. Mona Hatoum travels around the world, teaching in Paris and Maastricht, exhibiting in Basel, Jerusalem and New York, and commuting since joining the DAAD scholarship in 2003 between London and Berlin. Her constant alienating them repeatedly thematized in her work.
From the hair of a woman she braids the pattern of the Palestinian cloth that Arafat loved to wear. She gathers glass marbles on the ground to create a landscape where one can break one's neck. Her most personal work is the video installation "Measures of Distance". In front of the image of her naked mother, Mona Hatoum reads in 1988 the letters that her mother wrote to her from Lebanon.
Six years later, the artist disturbs with another radical installation: with the help of an endoscopic camera, she shines through her innermost: the mouth, the throat, the stomach, the intestine. The viewer's gaze travels, torments through their guts. The own body? at the same time a foreign continent and perhaps the only homeland of the exile.
Radical and disturbing are the works of Mona Hatoum
Her ambiguous objects and provocative installations finally earned Mona Hatoum a nomination for the Turner Prize in 1995? the most prestigious of all art prizes. It gets him another: the British Damien Hirst, who is especially known for his formaldehyde inlaid shark. But the nomination alone catapults Mona Hatoum to the top: the Museum of Contemporary Art, the MoMA, the Tate Gallery? everyone is tearing them now. At auctions, their works achieve higher prices every year. The British gallerist Charles Saatchi, the discoverer of the "Young British Artists", also adds some of her pieces to his radical collection.
In Germany it takes a little longer to discover them. Five years ago, Mona Hatoum was a guest at the Documenta 11 in Kassel and disturbed her with the kitchen installation "Homebound". She'd wired and electrified kitchen furniture from the fifties, iron beds, and seemingly harmless appliances.
Where is the journey of Mona Hatoum going? She always wants to reinvent herself, she explains. Always take another path. Do not rest, do not rest. Because a new direction can bring a new perspective, unexpected and sudden. Mona Hatoum seems prepared for her trip. The Exilantin's shield is her sense of humor, especially the self-staring one: "I have occasionally exhibited with young British artists, and then someone asked me," What is YBA (Young British Art)? "And I answered: This is a kind of BSE (mad cow disease) ... but do not worry, it only attacks artists. "
