Entering the gallery a deliciously coloured array of what at first glance appears to be leftover Christmas baubles lies scattered on a stainless steel gurney. As if being offered hardboiled candies, we are in reality presented with opalescent bombs, casts of hand grenades that would break more than your jaw if they were live. They are seductive fruits of knowledge emblematic of fallen human lives. In her latest show, the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum has tinkered with a selection of bric-a-brac inspired by global malfeasance. The art takes a chillingly ambivalent position on the violence in the Middle East as if to superficially appropriate it insofar as it can be made decorative.
Everyday objects of the modern Islamic state are incised, branded and impressed with the images of omnipresent strife. Armed foot soldiers encircle a room, their forms cast from the light of an ornate brass lantern. Called 'Misbah', a reference to prayer beads, the soldiers appear one by one in line and in order just like the repetitive thumbing of beads. In one plexiglass case, a keffieh headdress embroidered with a chicken wire motif is spread out like the relic of a war hero. In a small series, oil stains on cheap paper plates define ephemeral borders. Hatoum calls these protean stains that she outlines with pen "Clouds", recalling John Constable's wistful studies of the same subject... without the romance.
The New York Times Magazine recently reported that in Afghanistan the image of B-52 bombers is woven into local carpets. Here too is a traditional carpet, a silhouetted map of the world with its weighted geopolitical implications shaved into its pile. Elsewhere, kaleidoscopic skull patterns are cut from white tissue paper in deceitfully quiet child's play. One room at the back of the gallery is a sort of vision of the hanging gardens of Babylon as a pile of bunker sandbags sprouting fresh grass (a shred of optimism?). Hatoum sees history's remains as a moot, malevolent mix of wares, available for sale in the whitewashed walls of art's bazaar.
Violence is most tangibly present in a series made by wrapping kitchen utensils with wax paper, and flattening the used sheets to reveal nebulous impressions of grating surfaces, prickly sieve pinholes, and splintering diffraction patterns that radiate the lines of their handmade creases. Never before have implements as banal as graters, colanders, and strainers - all named specifically in the titles to the works - taken on such nefarious connotations. In her previous work Hatoum held a similar critical (clinical?) stance. Now she extends her repertoire to treat death and destruction as a fact and create art laced with the sobering memorial of this embrace.
A room-sized installation entitled "Mobile Home" has two large riot barricading fences that like a marionette's hand paddles are strung with the scattered contents of domesticity, including washcloths and water basins, children's playthings and well-worn luggage. This is the modern plight of the exiled, their lives caught in a matrix of push and pull, like a indelicate puppet play twisted with the prospect of it never-ending. The pieces slide back and forth across the floor, its mechanization hidden from sight. It's the largest installation in the show, and it is its weakest.
Hatoum's brilliance lies in imbuing simplicity with the edge of something more sinister.
Filling a gallery show with the props of a genocidal nightmare, Hatoum is never willing to let the impending shadow of doom fade from her work. Somehow art in a major key of practically any sort would be comforting after soaking in Hatoum's creative imagination, so steely is its resolve to haunt, to leave things unsaid. The artist has in this exhibition created a body of work that as a whole could be judged to be weak if you stripped it of its context. However, at their best, Hatoum's art resonates a disturbing beauty that inhales philosophical misgivings and exhales its contents in polished fragments, balancing the unusual and the unnerving.
Steven Pulimood
Mona Hatoum
Galerie Chantal Crousel
10 rue Charlot
75003 Paris
T +33 1 42 77 38 87
Steve Pulimood was educated at Columbia University in New York City. He is a doctoral candidate at Oxford researching the anatomy studies of Leonardo da Vinci, and preparing a book on that topic. He lives in Paris.
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