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Lot Essay
Talking about one of her recent works, Mona Hatoum explained that she was "trying to create a feeling of unease...to destabilize the space, so that when you walk in, you literally feel the ground shift below your feet." Yet the intense emotions her work provoke come also from the complex chain of associations that these purely physical sensations accompany. In Silence, for example, Mona Hatoum has built a small cage of glass tubes, which seems to hover weightlessly. That the fragile structure can easily be shattered does not make it any less threatening, especially since its shape suggests a child's crib, and hence, it evokes an absent but vulnerable body.
Mona Hatoum has long been fascinated by the fantasies that govern the sense of the body in an age dominated by technology. Recently she has used sound and video records of ordinary exploratory medical procedures in order to reveal the invisible and forbidding image of the body within. Silence can also be seen in this context, the hollow network of transparent tubes brings to mind the paraphernalia of research laboratories but also the interior of the body--organs, nerves, blood vessels. Thus the work becomes a metaphoric meeting place for the man-made and organic structures of which life depends. (Amelia Arenas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1995).
Mona Hatoum has long been fascinated by the fantasies that govern the sense of the body in an age dominated by technology. Recently she has used sound and video records of ordinary exploratory medical procedures in order to reveal the invisible and forbidding image of the body within. Silence can also be seen in this context, the hollow network of transparent tubes brings to mind the paraphernalia of research laboratories but also the interior of the body--organs, nerves, blood vessels. Thus the work becomes a metaphoric meeting place for the man-made and organic structures of which life depends. (Amelia Arenas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1995).