Room 3
Globe, 2007
Mild steel
170 cm. diameter
Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins
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In Hatoum’s work there is an important group of installations and sculptures that constitute a landscape of forms made up of grids, gratings, cages and rigid metal structures architectonic in design, but referencing precisely the architecture of confinement and imprisonment, with a strong sense of enclosure and violence. This cage-like globe is approximately the size of a person’s average height and tilts at the same angle as the earth. With steel bars woven together in the manner of medieval window bars, the sculpture looks like a large heavy cage that is about to roll. In this work, the globe is stripped of all its geographical and political borders to create a minimal space of imprisonment, large enough only for one.
Turbulence (Black), 2014
Black glass beads
3 x 250 cm diameter
Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins
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This work configures glass beads – as black as pitch – into a large circle that is unstable and shifting as if in turmoil, like the disturbed surface of a black hole opening up in the gallery floor. This floor-based work appears like something that can swallow you or spill over from one moment to the next, covering the surrounding landscape with its black body. It is both threatening and surprising. Yet again, the ambivalence of a perfect minimal form contains an unstable, alive, shapeless substance that is dangerously attractive and sensual. It is a form ready to go beyond the limits.
Present Tense, 1996
Soap, glass beads
4.5 x 299 x 241 cm
Courtesy of the artist and White Cube, London
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This work was first created for Anadiel Gallery in East Jerusalem in 1996. It is made of 2400 blocks of traditional olive oil soap from Nablus, a city North of Jerusalem. The drawing on the surface depicts the map of the 1993 Oslo Peace Agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. The lines of red glass beads pushed into the surface of the soap delineate the territories that were meant to be handed back to the Palestinian authority. But the map looks like hundreds of little islands with no continuity or territorial integrity among them. It is obviously a map that is about dividing and controlling the area.
Reflection, 2013
Print on three layers of tulle, aluminum
140 x 208 x 9.4 cm
Private collection, São Paulo
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Reflection is a delicate work that plays upon transparency and lightness. A photograph of the artist's mother sewing, taken in 1948 in Beirut, is printed on three layers of tulle. This technique gives the impression of three dimensions and movement; the subject seems present, just as it fades away.
Projection, 2006
Abaca and cotton
89 x 140 cm
Private collection, São Paulo
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A white on white work that uses cotton and abaca to create its image, Projection presents what to most viewers is an unfamiliar image of the world since it uses the ‘Peters’ projection, an egalitarian representation of land mass in true proportion as opposed to the more usual visualisation of the globe from a dominant northerly perspective. The image in Projection presents a positive-negative reversal, where the continents appear like sinking fissures or gaps, as if they have been etched or corroded away. The work presents an apocalyptic vision of the future suggesting the imminent threat of global warming and the changes this may have to our global geography.
Measures of distance, 1988
Video with sound
15:30 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
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This video work constructed from a series of grainy stills shot in extreme close-up of Hatoum's mother in the shower of the family home in Beirut. The images are overlaid with a mesh of Arabic writing, like a curtain or a veil, which represent her mother's letters from Beirut to her in London. The soundtrack consists of an animated conversation between Hatoum and her mother overlaid with Hatoum's voice reading a translation of the letters into English. The video is concerned with the artist's separation from her Palestinian family and in particular, her relationship with her mother. The personal and political are inextricably bound up in a narrative that explores identity and sexuality against a backdrop of traumatic social rupture, war, exile and displacement.