Selected Press - Galerie Chantal Crousel...alerie hantal rousel hala, olette. «Mona Hatoum, au...

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Mona Hatoum

Selected Press

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Khalaf, Colette. «Mona Hatoum, au singulier et au pluriel», L’Orient le Jour, July 5, 2016.http://www.lorientlejour.com/article/994832/mona-hatoum-au-singulier-et-au-pluriel.html

Rétrospective

Les œuvres de Mona Hatoum habitent la Tate Modern à Londres, jusqu’au 21 août. Une petite visite vaut le détour si on est dans le coin.Colette KHALAF (à Londres) | OLJ05/07/2016

Elle marche, marche, Mona Haoum. Comme si elle traversait la planète. Cette artiste aux vies multiples, aux mille fenêtres dans sa tête, avance à grands pas. Elle marche tout comme sa vidéo l’indique alors qu’elle a attaché des Doc Martins à ses pieds nus (symbole à la fois de la police et des Skinheads) et a marché dans les rues de Brixton en 1985 pour participer à une exposition collective organisée par Stefan Szczelkun.Tout le travail de Mona Hatoum est étayé par les événements du monde. Il en est l’écho. Restreindre son œuvre à son identité palestinienne et à sa démarche en faveur d’une région serait réducteur car l’artiste est citoyenne du monde.

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« You’re on camera »Depuis qu’elle s’est établie à Londres après la guerre du Liban, cette originaire de Palestine, née à Bey-routh et voguant aujourd’hui entre les eaux britanniques et berlinoises, a panaché durant trente-cinq ans son corps d’œuvre, d’une poésie et d’un réalisme sans frontières. Autant de l’Orient que de l’Occident, elle en a pris les fondations, les outils. Elle est comme ce sismographe qui enregistre la moindre turbu-lence, la plus petite secousse. Dans cette énorme rétrospective qui occupe les lieux, l’artiste deviendra tour à tour physicienne, tisserande ou radiologiste dans des performances toujours aussi diverses que puissantes.Don’t Smile, You’re on Camera en 1980 mélange ainsi des images vidéo live de l’audience avec des imageries de corps nus. En se servant de son art comme une arme, Mona Hatoum fustige la surveillance devenue omniprésente, voire planétaire.Toujours dans l’esprit de surveillance, ce Corps étranger, sorte de capsule futuriste où l’on pénètre et où l’on est révulsé par ce qu’on voit. Au sol, une vidéo sorte d’endoscopie projette des organes humains avec le bruit de fluides qui y circulent. Invasion du corps mais aussi des frontières d’autrui, c’est ce que Mona Hatoum essaye de remettre en évidence en 1994 par cette installation qui, insidieusement, hante l’esprit et fait questionner l’individu.

Public vs publicDans un autre registre, l’artiste interroge ce qui est public. À travers une chaise à forme féminine (avec poils de pubis sur le siège) – mais dont on retrouve la forme dans tous les jardins publics –, elle conjure l’esprit surréaliste de Magritte. Cet humour, on le retrouve souvent dans les œuvres de Mona Hatoum qui questionnent l’utilité et la portée des objets qui meublent la vie contemporaine.

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Que sont les objets quotidiens, quelle signification ont-ils dans notre vie de tous les jours ? Ne sont-ils pas également une intrusion de notre intime ? En abordant ces questions, Mona Hatoum réalise en 1993 deux grands meubles, censés être familiers : un lit métallique qui n’assure pourtant que de l’inconfort ainsi qu’un paravent en forme d’une râpe. Plus tard, en 2000, elle reprend cette même idée d’environnement qui, quoique d’apparence anodine, semble menaçant. Chaque individu les a introduits, volontairement ou non, dans son intime pour en devenir par la suite l’esclave. Homebound, construit en 2000, traduit la dextérité de l’artiste ainsi que ses nombreuses connaissances de la physique, de la géométrie dans l’espace et des mathématiques. Au loin, on entend un grésillement. En approchant de cette pièce qui offre à voir l’assemblage d’une chaise électrique, on découvre à notre grande surprise que ce ne sont que des ustensiles de cuisine. Installés dans un circuit électrique et fermé, ils témoignent de notre dépendance de simples modèles créés par l’homme lui-même.

À l’écoute du mondeLe confinement, l’étrangeté et l’emprisonnement sont autant de thèmes chers à Mona Hatoum, qui a ce talent de les exprimer sous différents angles et de différentes manières. Emprisonnement dans cette Light sentence en 1992 (réalisée donc avant Homebound) ; dans Quarters en 1996 mais également dans Impenetrable en 2009. Toute impression d’aérien s’estompe laissant place à une incarcération effroyable dans cette structure légère de fils métalliques qui semblent léviter, appelée Light Sentence. Les fils métal-liques ne sont en effet que des fils barbelés qui évoquent les grandes prisons célèbres. Mona Hatoum aime tromper le regard et se jouer des intimes sensations. Elle sème le trouble dans tout esprit apaisé par la monotonie et réveille les corps alanguis. Dans ces grandes installations, où elle a recours à des grilles, à la géométrie du cube ainsi qu’à la sérialité, Hatoum peut transformer le cube en une cage et la grille en barrière. Pour elle, Light Sentence utilise la lumière, les ombres et le mouvement afin de déstabiliser l’espace.L’instabilité du monde a toujours été au centre des préoccupations de l’artiste pluridisciplinaire. Certes, la nostalgie de la Palestine, son pays natal, est évoquée à travers cette grande installation de plus de deux mille carrés de savons originaires de Naplouse, où une carte a été dessinée d’après les accords d’Oslo de 1993 ; à travers une conversation intimiste avec sa mère mais aussi à travers ces douze broderies réalisées par Inaash (2012-2013) et accrochées comme des fenêtres et qui représentent des régions de la Palestine. Mais au-delà de ces problèmes régionaux, Hatoum aime faire un éclairage sur les grands problèmes du monde et qui sont certainement les grands conflits qui génèrent sans cesse l’instabilité. Un grand module de sable avec une grande aiguille rotative, réalisé en 1994 puis en 2004, aplanit puis disperse le sable dans un mouvement rotatoire continu. Plus loin, de grosses billes noires posées au sol traduisent ce même sentiment d’instabilité. Comme une énergie... sombre. Enfin, le regard est attiré à la sortie par cette map-pemonde énorme brillant de mille feux rouges. Ces néons qui illuminent les continents réfèrent à ce qu’a appelé Mona Hatoum Hot Spot, une sphère en danger continu et qui ne connaît peut-être jamais (?) la tranquillité.

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Spence, Rachel. «Mona Hatoum, Tate Modern, London, review — ‘Triumphant’», The Financial Times, May 9, 2016.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/42d1e3de-13b0-11e6-91da-096d89bd2173.html#axzz48GUMzsAV

May 9, 2016 6:07 pm

Mona Hatoum, Tate Modern, London, review — ‘Triumphant’Rachel Spence

Mona Hatoum’s ‘Light Sentence’ (1992). Photo: Philippe Migeat

Before there was Warsan Shire, there was Mona Hatoum. Shire’s poem “Home”, which opened with the lines “No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark,” has made her the 21st-century cantor for exodus. Yet the Somali-British poet is heir to a lineage of artists who have wrenched lyricism out of relocation.

As Tate Modern’s triumphant new show demonstrates, no one has expressed the terrible beauty of unbe-longing better than Mona Hatoum. Born in Beirut in 1952, the artist experienced a double exile. Her Palestinian family were obliged to leave Israel in 1948 and “existed with a sense of dislocation”, Hatoum has said. Then, in 1975, Hatoum found herself stranded in London when civil war broke out in Lebanon. She completed art school in the British capital and now divides her time between London and Berlin, though a nomadic gene sees her accept residencies throughout the world.

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Despite her personal trauma, Hatoum is far from a confessional artist. Tate’s exhibition opens with “Socle du Monde” (“Base of the world”), a cube covered in black iron filings which cling to hidden magnets, which is named after a 1961 sculpture by Piero Manzoni.

The intellectual jester of conceptualism, Manzoni placed a plinth upside down to suggest that our entire planet was displayed on its surface. In a smooth metal which anticipated minimalism, Manzoni’s work echoed the Duchampian credo that all the world’s an artwork waiting for a museum to put it on display. Hatoum keeps the hermetic geometry, thereby declaring herself an artist who has no intention of letting her feelings overwhelm her form, yet her tactile pelt whispers of uncanny forces caged within, as if Carl Andre had been reimagined by Steven King’s Carrie.

By the time she made “Socle du Monde” in 1992-93, Hatoum had adopted minimalist form as her main grammar. Yet the first rooms remind us that her early language was performance. A black and white photograph of Hatoum’s bare feet tied to a pair of Doc Martens (footwear of choice for fashionable skinheads) as she trudges through Brixton is the legacy of a film — on screen in a later room — entitled “Roadworks” (1985) that sprang out of her anger at the era’s race riots.

A layer-cake of imagery assembled from contact sheets and grainy footage, “Don’t smile, you’re on camera” (1980), creates the illusion that male bodies are being surreptitiously stripped by a prying lens. The unsettling sleight of eye speaks of an artist revenging herself — for this violating gaze is hers — on an art establishment which has denuded women for centuries.

Taking her cue from a generation of feminist artists before her, Hatoum saw performance as a “revo-lutionary medium”. But by the 1990s she had outgrown its innate melodrama. Made in 1992, “Light Sentence” is one of her earliest installations. Consisting of two rows of wire-mesh lockers in between which hangs a single, swaying lightbulb, it envelops the spectator in an infinite grid of silky, fluctuating, wolf-grey shadows. At once prison cell, interrogation chamber and battery cage, yet also astoundingly, autonomously beautiful, it has an especially powerful resonance in a gallery where Agnes Martin, subject of a Tate retrospective last year, was a recent resident.

But the American painter declared that her lines were “innocent as trees” — private, transcendent expres-sions of her outer world. Hatoum puts her matrices to more pointed use. She know that without the grid there can be no cage, no prison cell, no bed, no electric power and no map, all of which are recurring tropes in her oeuvre. (Tate’s show, sensibly, does not adhere to chronology and thus maintains the cycli-cal elegance of Hatoum’s material repetitions and recalibrations.) As such, Hatoum is in the vanguard of a skein of political artists, including Cornelia Parker, Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Hajra Waheed, who use the foundation stone of geometric abstraction to temper overt emotion.

However, Hatoum also sieves her sensibility through a surrealist filter. She often uses organic substances — hair, blood, urine — and has a predilection for household objects which makes her the daughter of Meret Oppenheim and Louise Bourgeois, feminist artists who also turned the tools of their oppression into weapons.

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Mona Hatoum’s ‘Grater Divide’ (2002). Photo: Iain Dickens, courtesy White Cube

At Tate, a gigantic cheese grater is blown up to resemble a hazardous daybed. A French garden chair (“Jardin Public”, 1993) sprouts a triangle of pubic hair from the holes in its seat. The unsettling menace is intensified by the whine of “Homebound” (2000), an installation of objects — colanders, child’s cot, hamster cage, assorted lightbulbs and furniture — electrically wired together so that they buzz, dim and flare with ominous indifference to our presence.

Time and again these Plath-like howls of fury are quietened by Hatoum’s rationalist architecture. “Home-bound”, for example, is framed by a colony of exquisitely pared-down works including “Present Tense” (1996), a rectangle of golden soap bars which bears the faint tracing of a map of Palestinian territories as

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drawn up in the Oslo peace accords. On the wall, swatches of burnt toilet paper (“Untitled”, 1989) have been burnt with tiny perforations that form stuttering, singed rows suggestive of an indecipherable morse code.

Mona Hatoum’s ‘Hot Spot’ (2009). Photo: Agostino Osio, courtesy Fondazione Querini Stampalia Onlus, Venice

These diminutive interventions balance out the brutal violence that simmers in Hatoum’s monumental installations. The second half of this show introduces us to “Quarters” (1996), four metal beds with bare mattress frames stacked five high and arranged in the panopticon shape that, thanks to its capacity for surveillance, made for ideal Victorian prisons. Nearby is “Hot Spot” (2013), a stainless steel globe with the continents outlined in red neon as if the entire world was in flames. Just as it’s all getting too apocalyptic, we have “Projection” (2006), another map traced in flocks of cotton on a white ground

which imagines our planet as a pillowy, utopian phantom, the alter ego of those bleak, ascetic bunks.

As a songstress of home, clearly Hatoum is no Martha Stewart. Yet, despite critical attempts to pigeonhole her, she also isn’t the visual equivalent of Edward Said. Although Said, the pre-eminent witness to the Palestinian displacement, wrote a beautiful essay about her work in 2000, reproduced in Tate’s catalogue, Hatoum’s concerns venture further. The plight of her parents’ birthplace is always on her radar. But she’s also telling us that domesticity is death to female empowerment. And that few of us, regardless of gender, ever truly find a refuge.

The show closes with “Undercurrent (red)” (2008), a scarlet mat whose tight weave loosens into tentacles plugged into lightbulbs, their intermittent glow reminding us just how much blood there is on everybody’s carpet these days. It’s a strong piece, reminiscent yet not derivative of the Aids-related light works of Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres.

A more subtle coup de foudre would have been delivered by “Measures of Distance”, which sits halfway through the exhibition. Made in 1988, this video is a palimpsest of sound and image, showing Hatoum’s mother as she takes a shower, her body barely discernible behind a curtain of Arabic writing. Fluid as a river, spiky as barbed wire, as inspired a grid as Hatoum ever devised, the calligraphy makes a perfect formal container for the sadness in Hatoum’s voice as she reads aloud the letters her mother wrote to her during their separation.

As lines such as “Dear Mona, I have not been able to send you any letters because the local post office was destroyed by a car bomb . . . ” echo through the rooms before and beyond, we intuit that this exhibition will disrupt our own homecoming.

To August 21, tate.org.uk

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Pickford, James. «Tate explores exile, violence and voyeurism in Hatoum exhibition», The Financial Times, May 3, 2016.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/da01ee54-112e-11e6-91da-096d89bd2173.html#axzz48GUMzsAV

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May 3, 2016 3:33 pm

James Pickford

The 35-year career of Mona Hatoum is to be explored by Tate Modern in the first major UKretrospective of the Lebanese-born artist’s work.

Giant cheese graters, an endoscopy video, a map made from soap blocks, and sandbagsimplanted with seeds are some of the 100 works on display in the contemporary gallery’ssummer show, which opens on Wednesday.

Ms Hatoum, whose parents are Palestinian, came to the UKto study art in the 1970s but found herself marooned in the country after civil war inLebanon prevented her return. She studied at Byam Shaw School of Art before going on tothe Slade School of Fine Art.

Themes of exile, conflict, violence and voyeurism pervade her work. In the early part of hercareer she became known for video and performance work, before moving on to large-scaleinstallations and sculptures. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995, the year in

Tate explores exile, violence and voyeurismin Hatoum exhibition

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which Damien Hirst won with his formaldehyde-preserved cow and calf.

Ms Hatoum makes use of everyday objects or materials — but transformed or presented inunusual or unsettling ways. In “Homebound” (2000), mundane kitchen utensils andhousehold furniture are connected by wires through which an audible high-voltage currentbuzzes threateningly.

Simple mesh wire boxes piled up in a U-shaped structure are given a more eerie edge in“Light Sentence” (1992) by a slow-moving central lightbulb that casts complex,disorientating shadows on the gallery walls and viewers.

The human body — and in particular women’s bodies — is another focus of her work. Oneof her best known artworks is “Corps Etranger” (1994), in which Ms Hatoum used anendoscopic camera to probe the outside and inside of her own body, including images ofher digestive tract as the camera journeys through her intestines and colon. The work, firstshown at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, was intended to explore ideas of surveillance andinvasion.

Clarrie Wallis, Tate curator of modern and contemporary British art, said the artist was lesswell known in the UK than on the continent, which the exhibition would help redress.“What she does is to transcend her [circumstances] and present her art as universal. Herwork feels incredibly relevant in terms of the world today.”

“Mona Hatoum” runs from May 4 to August 31 at Tate Modern.

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Pickford, James. «Tate explores exile, violence and voyeurism in Hatoum exhibition», The Financial Times, May 3, 2016.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/da01ee54-112e-11e6-91da-096d89bd2173.html#axzz48GUMzsAV

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Smith, Ali. «Never take anything for what it appears to be. Ali Smith on Mona Hatoum», Tate ETC., Issue 37, Summer 2016, pp.78-81.

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Adrian Searle, Jonathan Jones, Oliver Wainwright and Nancy Groves. «Art and Design. Mona Hatoum», The Guardian, Wednesday, May 4, 2016, p.17.

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Spencer, Samuel. «Review: Mona Hatoum Blends Abstract, Agitprop at Tate Modern», Blouin Art Info, May 5, 2016.http://uk.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1393986/review-mona-hatoum-blends-abstract-agitprop-at-tate-modern

Review: Mona Hatoum Blends Abstract, Agitprop at Tate ModernBy SAMUEL SPENCER | MAY 05, 2016

«Undercurrent (red),» 2008, by Mona Hatoum(© Mona Hatoum. Photo Stefan Rohner, Courtesy Kunstmuseum St. Gallen)

London’s Tate Modern is presenting the first UK retrospective of Lebanese/Palestinian Mona Hatoum, which runs until August 21.

Rather than going in chronological order, the curators have chosen a sort of thematic display that in the accompanying brochure they call “a series of juxtapositions.” In theory, this means that the many strands of the exhibition, the abstract and the agitprop, the personal and the political, are woven together, not unlike the number of weaved works made of human hair and other unconventional materials that feature. In practice, however, this can make for a muddled, yet always compelling, experience. If there are two things that Hatoum likes as an artist they are simple, bold political statements (like the footprints featu-ring the word “unemployed” she stamped across Sheffield in one work), and bad puns, particularly sexual ones. This is an artist equally at home making comments on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and making a work like “Jardin public,” 1993, a chair featuring a ball of hair whose title is a pun on “public/pubic,”

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creating a randy readymade like Marcel Duchamp with a dirty mind.

Seeing these two sides of the artist together is certainly interesting, but it serves to cheapen the more political works. Documents for performance works like “Negotiating Table,” 1983, in which the artist lay seemingly mangled and bloodied under a sheet as the sound of war reportage plays, must rely on their bluntness to make their impact, and when shown near less serious work like “Van Gogh’s Back,” a photograph of a man’s back hair arranged into Starry Night-like swirls, they just seem overly simplistic and on-the-nose. However, perhaps this is appropriate, as the nose is one of the many body parts Hatoum uses in works in the exhibition, photographing herself with a toy climber on her face like a mini military mountaineer. In fact, visitors will see works not only on-the-nose, but on-the-breast, on-the-back, and in the case of one work, inside-the-body.

However, it is when the artist gets away from the personal and the political that the exhibition has its best moments. One such work is “+ and -,” 1994-2004, a yin-yang sculpture in which a circle in sand is constantly furrowed and smoothed over in a revolving circle to create a definite exhibition highlight. These abstract works can also be her most effective political works, as with “Impenetrable,” 2009 a cube comprised of hanging barbed wire strands. Other successful works take a more oblique look at issues, like a series of works that show the terror implicit in domesticity, a comment both on women feeling trap-ped in the home and the house arrests political enemies can find themselves subject to all over the world.

Always skillfully done but occasionally shallow, the exhibition is worth seeing for its best moments, which glow incandescently, sometimes literally so as in the last piece in the exhibition.

“Mona Hatoum” runs until August 21 at Tate Modern.

Mona HatoumHomebound 2000Kitchen utensils, furniture, electrical wire, light bulbs, dimmer unit, amplifier and two speakersDimensions variableCourtesy Rennie Collection, Vancouver © Mona Hatoum

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Mona HatoumHot Spot III2009Stainless steel, neon tubePhoto: Agostino Osio, Courtesy Fondazione Querini Stampalia Onlus, Venice ©Mona Hatoum

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Mona HatoumLight Sentence 1992Galvanised wire mesh lockers, electric motor and light bulb198 x 185 x 490Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris: Mnam-CCI / Dist RMN-GPPhoto: Philippe Migeat © Mona Hatoum

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Mona HatoumOver My Dead Body1988Inkjet on paper204 x 304 © Courtesy of the artist

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Mona HatoumGrater Divide2002Mild steel204 x 3.5 cm x variable width© Photo Iain Dickens, Courtesy White Cube © Mona Hatoum

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Mona HatoumMeasures of Distance1988Video, colour and sound, 15 min 30 secTate. Purchased 1999©Mona Hatoum

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Mona HatoumPerformance Still 1985/1995Gelatin silver print on paper mounted on aluminium76.4 x 108Tate. Presented by Tate Patrons 2012 Photo Edward Woodman, Courtesy White Cube © Mona Hatoum

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3 cool Mona Hatoum works in the new Tate show

Clarrie Wallis, curator of Mona Hatoum at Tate Modern, talks us through 3 pieces in the new retrospective

Wallis, Clarrie. «3 cool Mona Hatoum works in the new Tate show», Phaidon, May 3, 2016.http://fr.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2016/may/03/3-cool-mona-hatoum-works-in-the-new-tate-show/

Undercurrent (red) 2008 - Mona Hatoum at Tate Modern, photo Mat Smith

We’ve been looking forward to the new Mona Hatoum show which opens tomorrow at Tate Modern. Hatoum’s artworks combine states of emotion and alienation with the formal simplicity of Minimalism, creating powerful evocations of displacement, denial and othermess.

Born in the Lebanon she was exiled to London when civil war broke out in the mid Seventies. She creates architectonic spaces which relate to the body, language and the condition of exile. The Tate Modern show is a retrospective of the work she’s created since arriving in London in 1975. Some of it features in our Contemporary Artist Series book Mona Hatoum and is explained in a series of interviews, personal wri-tings and critiques. We urge you to get a copy before visiting the show as it will serve as a great explainer or introduction to her work

This morning we caught up with the Tate Modern’s Clarrie Wallis and asked her to tell us about three of our favourite pieces in the show she and Hatoum co-curated.

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Hot Spot 2013 - Mona Hatoum at Tate Modern, photo Mat Smith

Hot Spot 2013 «This is one of my favourite pieces in the show. What is particularly important about Mona is how she is able to transcend local issues and create something that is universal. And this is really what this work is about. Mona talks about it being an idea of a world that is continually in conflict and unrest and the idea that it’s a global situation, so it’s not really about the local, it’s about the universal. The term hot spot refers to a place of military or civil unrest. Using delicate red neon to outline the contours of the continents, the sculpture presents the entire globe as a danger zone – what Mona describes as a ‘world continually caught up in conflict and unrest’.»

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Impenetrable 2009 - Mona Hatoum at Tate Modern, photo Mat Smith

Impenetrable 2009 «This relates to a particularly tense time for her. Once again it shows Mona engaging with minimalism, minimal strategies. In it she is reimagining a late Sixties work called Penetrables, hanging cubes made from colourful rubber tubes by an artist called (Jésus Rafael) Soto. Here the cubes are dematerialised and reimagined. Although it looks very light and very elegant because it’s sort of levi-tating across the floor actually it’s made from rods of barbed wire – heavy with connotations of conflict and exclusion.»

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Undercurrent (red) 2008 - Mona Hatoum at Tate Modern, photo Mat Smith

Undercurrent (red) 2008 «Here Mona has worked with electrical cables to create an extraordinary floor work which feels like it has a life of its own. It feels like it’s breathing and pulsating. So it feels like a very fitting and dramatic end to the exhibition (it’s in the last room) and is very much in keeping with the ideas that have come before.»

Want to know more about Hatoum’s work? The distinguished art critic Guy Brett explores her key themes in our Contemporary Artist Series book Mona Hatoum. Hatoum herself describes a chronology of prac-tice in conversation with Michael Archer, writer, curator and co-founder of London’s Audio Arts sound archive. And Director of the Kanaal Art Foundation Catherine de Zegher makes a complex and provoca-tive analysis of Recollection, a work she commissioned for a sixteenth-century beguinage.

Hatoum has also chosen a text by the influential Palestinian author Edward Said as well as a statement from the noted Italian post-war sculptor and performance artist Piero Manzoni. The book also includes Hatoum’s own notes, statements and interviews.

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Julie Bertron. «Une oeuvre tissée Art corporel et artisanat chez Mona Hatoum», Hors d’Oeuvre, n°36, May, 2016, p.9.

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H G Masters. «Heat Stroke», ArtAsiaPacific, vol. XI, Almanac 2016, p. 55.

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Françoise-Aline Blain. «Rétrospective Mona Hatoum», Beaux Arts Magazine, n°41, July 1, 2015.

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Clément Ghys. « Mona Hatoum tranche dans l’art », Libération, June, 30, 2015, N°10609, p.30.

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Philippe Dagen. «Mona Hatoum, l’art en toute légèreté», Le Monde, June 26, 2015.

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Judith Benhamou-Huet. «Les objets qui parlent de Mona Hatoum», Les Echos, June 26, 2015.

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Roxana Azimi. «J’ai un sentiment général d’incertitude et je questionne tout autour de moi», Le Quotidien de l’Art, Monday, June 22, 2015, pp. 5, 6.

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Jim Quilty. «Mona Hatoum», Flash Art, n°296, May June 2014, p. 129.

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Chantal Crousel. «Opposition in performance», Canvas, May/June 2014, p. 140-141.

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SHOWCASE

Facing page:Mona Hatoum. The

Negotiating Table, from the Performance Documents series. 1983. Digital print of

three black and white prints. 51 x 65 cm. Image courtesy

the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

Chantal Crousel surveys a performance by Palestinian-born artist Mona Hatoum, The Negotiating Table. Made over 30 years ago, it continues to resonate today.

Mona Hatoum is widely recognised for an

extensive range of work that breaks borders of different na-

tures – those between the seen and the unseen, the self and

the other, between the intimate and the public, the fragile

and the resistant. And, of course, the borders between the

political and economic territories.

Throughout her career, Hatoum has been exploring a vast

variety of materials, such as her own fallen hair (Hair Necklace,

1995, or Hair Grids With Knots, 2006); her nails (One Year (2007),

2008); Oriental carpets; traditional Palestinian embroideries;

steel (Bourj, 2010); electrical cables (Undercurrent, 2004); light

bulbs (Light Sentence, 1992), and glass (Turbulence, 2012), to

name a few. Less known – and currently on display at her sur-

vey exhibition at Doha’s Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art

– are her early performance works, Performance Documents

(1980–87/2013).

Hatoum is a ‘displaced’ person because of her parents’ his-

tory of exile and her own experience of being stranded in

London in 1975 after the civil war broke out in Lebanon while

she was on a short visit to the UK. In the early 1990s, her al-

ienating experiences found expression in live performances

and video works, focusing on the body as a territory where

her concerns were presented in direct and spontaneous ac-

tions, thus reaching an audience that is not limited to the

established circles of art institutions.

This particular video documentation of the performance

The Negotiating Table (1983), is a live action piece that took

place at the Western Front (an artist-run centre) in Vancouver,

a few months after the 1982 massacre in the Palestinian refu-

gee camps of Sabra and Shatila in a southern suburb of Beirut.

The action took place in a dark room, lit by a single light bulb,

with the artist lying motionless on a large table surrounded by

empty chairs for three hours; her bloodstained body was cov-

ered in entrails wrapped in plastic and her head was firmly en-

veloped in surgical gauze. Audience members could walk to

the table where Hatoum lay, which was set up at ground level.

The soundtrack that accompanied the performance was

a recording of various news reports of the civil war and of the

peace discussions between Western leaders. The static nature

of the performance gave The Negotiating Table a sacrificial altar

feel and the empty chairs and voices of absent leaders high-

lighted the artist’s isolation.

This work was first performed at solo shows at Ottawa’s

SAW Gallery, the Niagara Artists Centre in St Catharines,

Canada (both in November 1983) and the Franklin Furnace

Gallery in New York one year later. Hatoum also performed

The Negotiating Table at the second International Festival of

Performance at the South Hill Park Arts Centre in Bracknell,

Berkshire in June 1984.

Over 30 years later, this violent, yet beautiful performance

has lost nothing of its original power and its pertinence reso-

nates today as strongly as it did at the date of its creation.

Though it was inspired by the explosive strife of the Leba-

nese Civil War and the Sabra and Shatila massacre, it remains

relevant as the instability of the Middle East continues to

bring leaders to fruitless negotiating tables.

OPPOSITION IN PERFORMANCE

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Chantal Crousel. «Opposition in performance», Canvas, May/June 2014, p. 140-141.

141

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Sylvie Fontaine. «Première monographie de Mona Hatoum au Centre Pompidou», Artaissime, n°10, May - September, 2015.

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Christine Van Assche. «Mona Hatoum, Faire Corps», Code Couleur 22, May - August, 2015, pp. 32 - 37.

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Kaelen Wilson-Goldie. «Mona Hatoum Centre Pompidou», Artforum, Vol. 53, n°9, May, 2015, p. 197.

SPÉCIAL MARSEILLE-PROVENCE 2013 EXPOSITION LE QUOTIDIEN DE L’ART / NUMÉRO 294 / VENDREDI 11 JANVIER 2013

PAGE 09

Conçu par Pascal Neveux, directeur du Fonds régional d’art contemporain Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, le projet aussi pléthorique que polysémique « Ulysses, un itinéraire d’art contemporain » fera escale en 2013 dans une soixantaine de lieux. Cette polyphonie artistique offre une multitude d’entrées, permettant d’embrasser les thèmes du nomadisme, de l’immigration, de l’exil et du territoire, bref un questionnement du monde au gré d’une cartographie mouvante. Un cocktail que réunit la limpide mini-rétrospective de Mona Hatoum organisée dans la chapelle des Pénitents noirs à Aubagne, une ville communiste très atypique, ancrée dans la démocratie participative. L’ambiguïté sourd dès le début avec une performance filmée de 1985, Roadworks. L’artiste marche péniblement dans un quartier londonien, quelque temps après une émeute raciale, les pieds nus reliés à des Dr Martens, godasses portées aussi bien par les skinheads que par les policiers britanniques. Plus loin, un ensemble de trois sculptures épouse l’architecture de quelques bâtiments de Beyrouth. Ces maquettes reproduisent les stigmates des bombardements, comme si elles portaient déjà en elles leur destruction programmée. L’ambivalence pointe dans les

cartes de Bagdad, Kaboul et Beyrouth, jalonnées de cratères et de dômes, villes-Sisyphe enchaînant destruction et reconstruction. Les objets les plus familiers n’échappent pas à cette dualité. En sur-dimensionnant le chapelet paternel, Mona Hatoum transforme les perles destinées à prier ou à se calmer en boulets de canon. Ou comment un objet du quotidien le plus intime peut soudain devenir belliqueux. Mais l’intime ne se laisse pas apprivoiser ou instrumentaliser si facilement. Les mèches rebelles s’échappent du keffieh, féminisent le symbole d’une résistance palestinienne virile. Ailleurs, les cheveux se dérobent aux sages grilles dans lesquelles l’artiste tente de les cadrer. L’exposition s’achève sur un alignement de savons, achetés à Naplouse et sur lesquels des pointillés tracés par de petites billes de verre incrustées à la surface des savons dessinent la carte d’un état palestinien émietté, trois ans après les accords d’Oslo. « J’ai choisi un matériau transitoire, le savon, qui peut se dissoudre. J’espérais que ces frontières puissent aussi disparaître », confie l’artiste. Et d’ajouter : « les gens pensent souvent que je pars d’un concept. Ce n’est pas le cas. Je pars des matériaux ». Parfois, une petite exposition nous en apprend bien plus sur un artiste que de longs discours. ]MONA HATOUM, MAPPINGS, du 15 janvier au 17 mars, Chapelle des

Pénitents noirs-Centre d’art Aubagne, Les Aires Saint Michel,

13400 Aubagne, tél. 04 42 18 17 26, www.aubagne.fr/penitentsnoirs

Mona Hatoum questionne le monde à Aubagne

P A R R O X A N A A Z I M I

Vue de l’exposition de Mona Hatoum « Mappings » à la Chapelle des Pénitents noirs, à Aubagne. Photo : D. R.

http://www.aubagne.fr/penitentsnoirs

http://www.semiose.com

Bertrand Dommergue. "Mona Hatoum", Artpress, n°408, February 2014, p.30.

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Anna Samson. «Taking it personally», Damn, January February 2014, p.68G

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Anna Samson. «Taking it personally», Damn, January-February, 2014, p.68-73.G

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Anna Samson. «Taking it personally», Damn, January-February 2014, p.68-73.G

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Anna Samson. «Taking it personally», Damn, January-February, 2014, p.68-73.G

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Anna Samson. «Taking it personally», Damn, January - February, 2014, p.68-73.G

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Bettina Wohlfarth, «Gegenwartskunst in Paris», Faz, January 3, 2014.http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/kunstmarkt/gegenwartskunst-in-paris-mit-haut-und-haar-und-knallroten-

herzen-12736245.html

Gegenwartskunst in ParisMit Haut und Haar und knallroten Herzen

03.01.2014 · Zwei Zeichensetzer in Paris: Cy Twombly wird bei Karsten Greve mit einer musealen Schau geehrt. Mona Hatoum zeigt ihre jüngsten Werke bei Chantal Crousel.

Die Werke von Mona Hatoum sind physisch. Schon in den achtziger Jahren erklärte sie ihren eigenen Kör-per zur Projektionsfläche politischer und sozialer Themen, heute benutzt die 1952 geborene Künstlerin die Materialität ihrer Werke, um diese Spannungen auszudrücken. Gleich der erste Raum der Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris offenbart diesen Willen zur Körperlichkeit: Dort stehen schmale, geschlossene Käfige in vers-chiedenen Größen, versehen mit dem Titel „Zellen“. Hineinpassen würde ein Mensch, manchmal stehend, mal kauernd. Sie wurden aus grobem Stabstahl gearbeitet und wirken wie mittelalterliche Marterfallen. Doch Gefangene sind nicht zu sehen: Am Boden jedes Käfigs liegen orangerote Gebilde; es sind ballonartige Herzen aus mundgeblasenem Glas, die vom kalten Stahl der Gitterstäbe regelrecht eingequetscht werden.

Seit mehr als dreißig Jahren sondiert die britisch-palästinensische Künstlerin ihre Erfahrung von Krieg und Exil, von Körper und Weiblichkeit. Ihr OEuvre zeugt von einer Expedition, die jedoch vom persönlichen Erleben abschweift, um Geschichte, Welt und politische Machtverhältnisse zu bearbeiten. Ihre Werke sind von dem allgemeinen Gefühl des Fremdseins geprägt. Als Kind palästinensischer Eltern, die in den Libanon flüchten mussten, wurde Mona Hatoum in Beirut geboren. Ein zweites Exil erlebte sie als junge Frau, als sie nach einem Aufenthalt in London nicht mehr in den Libanon zurückkehrte, weil dort der Bürgerkrieg ausge-brochen war.

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Mona Hatoum ist durch Krieg und Vertreibung zur Weltbürgerin geworden. Heute lebt sie in London und Berlin. In ihr international anerkanntes Werk investiert sie Haut und Haar. Seit 2003 verarbeitet sie ihr eigenes Haar - Metapher für Weiblichkeit, Sinnlichkeit und Intimität - in zarten „Hair-Drawings“ auf hand-geschöpftem Büttenpapier. In Paris ist nun „Hair-Mesh“ von 2013 ausgestellt: ein unfassbar feines, luftiges Gewebe, das wie ein durchsichtiger Wandteppich aus nichts als Haar gewebt wurde. Vis-à-vis löst sich schein-bar ein fast immaterielles Bild vor den Augen des Besuchers auf; es ist eine Fotografie, die Mona Hatoum auf drei Lagen Tüll gedruckt hat. Das Foto „Reflection“ zeigt ihre Mutter mit offenen Haaren bei der Handar-beit als irisierende Fata Morgana der Erinnerung im Jahr der Flucht aus der palästinensischen Heimat, 1948. Zeichnung und Foto führen einen Dialog zwischen Mutter und Tochter, zwischen Ursprung, Tradition und Gegenwart. So engagiert Mona Hatoums Kunst ist, in einigen jüngsten Arbeiten spürt man eine stärker wer-dende Melancholie. „Capello per due“ heißt eine Installation mit zwei Hüten, die von ihren Trägern verlassen auf einer Parkbank liegen, während am „Coat hanger“ ein Kleiderbügel baumelt, der zur Silhouette Palästinas gebogen wurde. (Werke auf Papier kosten von 3500 bis 12 000 Euro, Installationen und Skulpturen von 50 000 bis 450 000 Euro. Bis zum 22. Januar.)

Auf ganz andere Weise erkundet Cy Twombly die Tiefen der Erinnerung. Seine Arbeitsweise hat viel mit der eines Archäologen gemein, und das nicht nur, weil der amerikanische Künstler sich 1957, mit 29 Jahren, in Italien ansiedelte und zeitlebens die klassische Kulturgeschichte wie ein Schatzgräber auslotete. Twombly ist ein Künstler, der innere Gedankenbilder, Erinnerungen und Reminiszenzen zutage befördert und in einer nur scheinbar spontanen Zeichensprache auf dem Papier oder der Leinwand freilegt - wobei Verwerfungen und Radierungen, die Überlagerungen verschmierter Farben, zitternde Linien, unsicher gezeichnete Worte Teil des Werkes sind.

Die Ausstellung „On Paper“ bei Karsten Greve ist eine bewegende Hommage an den verehrten Künstler, der vor zwei Jahren gestorben ist. Die Sammlung umfasst Werke auf Papier aus mehr als drei Jahrzehnten, von Mitte der fünfziger Jahre mit den Anfängen in Rom bis Ende der achtziger Jahre. Drei Werke stehen zum Ver-kauf (Preise zwischen 170 000 und vier Millionen Euro). Hier zeigt Karsten Greve sein Herzstück.

Jedes Gemälde, jede Zeichnung ist bei Twombly das Ergebnis einer langen Auslese von Eindrücken, Lektüren, Empfindungen. Dem eigentlichen Arbeitsprozess als Synthese gehen lange Phasen der Vorbereitung voraus. Eine der „Sperlonga-Zeichnungen“, die 1959 während seines ersten Aufenthaltes in dem gleichnamigen italienischen Küstenstädtchen entstanden sind, ist konstruiert wie eine innere Landkarte, auf der Twombly die Schaumkronen des Meers und den weißen Anstrich der eng gruppierten Häuser verteilt, dann tauchen Geheimschriften seiner Erlebnisse auf, Spuren seiner Lektüren (Sappho). Zeichnungen wie „Venere Fran-chetti“ - 1959 hatte Cy Twombly Tatiana Franchetti geheiratet - oder „Venus + Adonis“ sind überschwängli-che, beschwingt obszöne Verarbeitungen sowohl von Ovids Metamorphosen oder Shakespeare als auch seiner Empfindungen. Wie die Seite eines Comic-Strip ist das Blatt in kleine Szenen gegliedert, die mit knallroten Herzchen und schwarzen Streichungen zensiert werden, dazwischen liest man „Dionysos“ und „Action“, „Life of the Emperor“ und „Battle of Issus“.

Cy Twombly ist einer der geheimnisvollsten Zeichensetzer. In einem dem Künstler gewidmeten Essay schrei-bt der Philosoph Roland Barthes: „Im Grunde sind die Leinwände Twomblys große, mediterrane Zimmer, warm und lichtdurchflutet, mit versprengten Elementen, die der Geist bevölkern will.“ (Bis zum 1. Februar.)

Bettina Wohlfarth, «Gegenwartskunst in Paris», Faz, January 3, 2014.http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/kunstmarkt/gegenwartskunst-in-paris-mit-haut-und-haar-und-knallroten-

herzen-12736245.html

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Laura Mclean-Ferris. “Mona Hatoum: You Are Still Here”, Art Review, Issue 60, Summer 2012, p.148 et 149.

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Laura Mclean-Ferris. “Mona Hatoum: you are still here”, Art Review, Issue 60, Summer 2012, p.148 et 149.

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Mona Hatoum By Chantal Crousel, Canvas, Volume 8 Issue 2, March - April 2012, p.111.

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“Mona Hatoum/Interwined”, Some/Things Magazine, Chapter005/She has no string Apollo, September 2011, p. 128-139.

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“Five Plus One”, Almanac 2010, ArtAsiaPacific, 2010.

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Samah Hijawi. “The politics of home”, Canvas, September - October 2008, p. 77 - 79.

Selected Press - Galerie Chantal Crousel...alerie hantal rousel hala, olette. «Mona Hatoum, au...

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