Mona Hatoum :: Artist Mona Hatoum Essays

Mona HatoumMost art scholars and critics look the consort of Mona Hatoum in sexual relation to her ethnic and geopolitically charged background. In her make writings and interviews, however, Hatoum cautions against this journalistic approach. For her, the most important element of her art is its kindred to the body. When Hatoum immigrated from the Middle East to England, she immediately felt a sense of extirpation when she perceived a mind/body disjunct that contradicted her own cultural experience it became immediately apparent to me that people were quite divorced from their bodies and precise caught up in their heads, like disembodied intellectuals. So I was perpetually very insistent on the physical in my work (Hatoum/Brett, 59). We match to the world through our senses. You first experience an artwork physicallyMeanings, connotations and associations get down after the initial physical imagination, intellect, psyche are fired saturnine by what youve seen (Hatoum/Arc her, 8).I weigh this statement against theory by carrying out scholar Nelly Richard The body is the physical agent of the structures of everyday experience. It is the transmitter of cultural messagesa repository of memories, an actor in the theatre of power, a create from raw stuff of affects and feelings. Because the body is at the boundary between biology and societyin terms of power, biography and history, it is the site par excellence for transgressing the constraints of meaning (Richard, 208).Focusing on quartette works by Hatoum, I take a position that esteem the artists own intent and uses the body as a starting acid for analyzing her work. However, I argue that it is necessary to consider her background in relation to the content of her art it is because of her background as an exile from political emphasis that so much of Hatoums work evokes a sense of danger by eliciting a visceral response from the viewer. I also argue that Hatoums work insists that the viewer recogn izes a second body, the implicit body of the oppressed. That insistence comes chiefly from two elements of her background her direct experience of living in the fill in of oppression, and her experience with feminist groups as an art student in London. Thus, in Hatoums work, two bodies-the body of the viewer and an implicit body--engage in a dialectic. needs then, I offer a brief glimpse into the background of Mona Hatoum. She is a Palestinian whose parents were exiled to Lebanon before she was born.