Mona Hatoum Research Articles

Installation art: between image and stage

This book explores how installation art developed into an interdisciplinary genre in the 1960s, and how its special intertwinement of the visual and the performative has acted as a catalyst for the generation of new artistic phenomena. It investigates how it became one of todays most widely used art forms, increasingly expanding into consumer, popular and urban cultures, where the installations often spectacular appearances ensure that they fit into contemporary demands for sense-provoking and immersive cultural experiences. Making an important contribution to the development of the critical and theoretical discourse on installation art, Ring Petersen addresses a series of basic questions: What is an installation? What techniques does it employ? How does installation art affect its viewers? How can we explain the rise of installation art in a cultural-historical perspective? Answers to these questions are pursued through analyses of installation arts spatial, temporal and discursive aspects as well as its reception aesthetics and cultural-historical contexts, and through analyses of a large number of works from a variety of sub-genres, including performance installations, video installations, installational exhibitions and recent use of installation in commercial contexts, including by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Olafur Eliasson, Mona Hatoum, Pipilotti Rist, Ilya Kabakov, Superflex, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Holler, Terike Haapoja and ART + COM.

Les collections muséales, entre histoire et contemporanéité. Mona Hatoum à la fondation Querini Stampalia

À partir de l’exposition Interior Landscape de Mona Hatoum à la fondation Querini Stampalia, présentée en 2009 parallèlement à la 53e Biennale de Venise, cet article analyse la réactualisation des collections historiques par des artistes contem­porains. Plusieurs aspects sont étudiés sur le plan muséographique : confrontation, intrusion par mimétisme et camouflage, rupture avec les modèles de stabilité au profit d’une expérience plus com­plexe pour le visiteur – et sur le plan temporel – anachronisme, juxtaposition des temps, remise en question du modèle historiciste au profit d’une approche plus engagée envers le présent. La réactualisation est définie comme une double stratégie. Une pre­mière stratégie muséale, répondant à un impératif événementiel, vise à redynamiser les collections historiques pour les rendre plus attrayantes et les sortir de leur modèle de stabilité et de perma­nence. La pratique de réactualisation est aussi l’occasion d’une seconde stratégie, critique cette fois, qui nécessite une nouvelle prise de conscience des musées face à leurs collections et qui s’inscrit dans une réflexion plus large sur le concept d’histoire. Ce second aspect de la stratégie incite les institutions muséales à repenser leur propre rapport à l’histoire et à l’historicité de leurs collections.

In the wake of the poetic: Palestinian artists after Darwish

Heralding a new period of creativity, In the Wake of the Poetic explores the aesthetics and politics of Palestinian cultural expression in the last two decades. As it increasingly gains a significant presence on the international scene, much of Palestinian art owes a debt to Mahmoud Darwish, one of the finest contemporary poets, and to Palestinian writers of his generation. Rahman maps the immense influence of Darwish’s poetry on a new generation of performance artists, visual artists, spoken-word poets, and musicians. Through an examination of selected works by key artists—such as Suheir Hammad, Ghassan Zaqtan, Elia Suleiman, Mona Hatoum, Sharif Waked, and others—Rahman articulates an aesthetic founded on loss, dispersion, dispossession, and transformation. It interrupts dominant regimes, constituting acts of dissension and intervention. It reinscribes belonging and is oriented toward solidarity and future. This innovative wave of experimentation transforms our understanding of the national through the diasporic and the transnational, and offers a profound meditation on identity. -- Publisher's website.

Football

of their ancestors and in having a strong identity of their own. Although contemporary Palestinian poets have been studied to some degree, and books and articles have been published about them, Palestinian performance artists , visual artists, and musicians have not been studied as much. Rahman tries to redress the balance in this small book of 190 pages, and she believes they all represent contemporary Palestinian political conditions and, as importantly, Palestinian aesthetics. Furthermore, she demonstrates in analytical detail that they continue Darwish’s vision and poetic legacy, and she convincingly argues that their work is nonetheless original and not derivative. To show that the political in good poetry and art is not mere propaganda for a cause, Rahman uses Jacques Roncière’s theorization of “dissensus” in his book Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010). The political in art is thus redefined, and art is shown to be able to interrupt dominant consensus and become dissensual while keeping its aesthetic qualities when it is generically good art. She applies this notion to the study of Palestinian poets and artists in the Palestinian territories and in Israel as well as in the Palestinian diaspora across continents. The result is this unique book with an acute vision into Palestinian poetry, art, and aesthetics , and into Palestinian identity and the current conditions in Palestine under Israeli occupation. While the reader is offered an understanding of Palestinian poetry in one chapter dealing with Suheir Hammad, Liana Badr, and Ghassan Zaqtan, he is treated to a review of the Palestinian cinema of Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu-Assad, and Rashid Masharawi in another; reading further, he is introduced to the visual art, photography , and videos of Palestinian artists Emily Jacir, Sharif Waked, Eman Haram, Mona Hatoum, Rehab Nazzal, and others in a following chapter. Palestinian rappers and hip-hop groups are studied in a later chapter as an expression of the politicization of youth, mostly protesting against the dispossession and alienation of Palestinians , sometimes even in Hebrew in order to reach Israeli audiences and sometimes in English in order to reach others still. In all cases, the poets and artists are shown to continue the poetics of Darwish and some other Palestinian writers, with whom they dialogue or intersect. Najat Rahman’s book is appreciated for being a good conspectus of Palestinian artists in the last two decades, particularly in the wake of Darwish’s powerful poetic works. With conciseness, it is successful in offering a clear study of a complex topic; and, in close readings of poems and art performances, the author beautifully shows how these artists express their belonging to Palestine despite many forces aiming at their erasure and how they have done so in aesthetically accepted ways. Issa J. Boullata McGill University, Montreal Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Football. Paris. Minuit. 2015. 122 pages. Jean-Philippe Toussaint introduces his new book on a very saturnine note, suggesting that it will please nobody, neither intellectuals , who are indifferent to soccer, nor soccer fans, who will find the book too intellectual. Were he writing about soccer and nothing else, Football would be far less intriguing. But many other things occupy Toussaint here: how the phenomenal world is often less attractive than the world conjured in our imagination; how melancholy serves both to sharpen and to blunt our perception of things; how a deliberately naïve, childlike approach to experience can help deflect our fear of dying; how the past escapes from us despite our best efforts to recapture it. “I’m pretending to write about soccer,” Toussaint confesses, “but I’m really writing , as always, about the passage of time.” That is not to say that soccer is absent from this book; to the contrary, it’s everywhere . But it interests Toussaint principally by virtue of the ways in which it fires his psyche. As staggeringly narcissistic as such a notion may seem, it is useful to remember that Toussaint has built a very distinguished literary career around the representation of the narcissistic subject; in a real sense, it’s his stock-in-trade. With that consideration in mind, Football may in fact be one of his less ego-driven texts because it opens patently onto the...

Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the US Frontera since 1984 by Ila Nicole Sheren

Reviewed by: Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the US Frontera since 1984 by Ila Nicole Sheren Camilla Fojas Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the US Frontera since 1984. By Ila Nicole Sheren. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. ix + 175 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth. Ila Nicole Sheren draws the title for her work, Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the US Frontera since 1984, from a phrase that circulates among artists and critics, from Guillermo Gómez Peña to Claire F. Fox, to explore the idea of the mobility and portability of the border. What she calls a “border problematic” is a strategy for negotiating the vexed issues that arise from what Walter D. Mignolo describes as “border thinking” or a way of thinking with and along the border and beyond and outside it, too. Sheren combines performance art and other forms of visual culture produced in relation to the United States–Mexico border with art that reflects on other international borders. She argues that the border is a performed space, not just a space of performance, and is thus a space of negotiation that cannot be reduced to its geographical location; she does so without effacing the historical and economic particularities of the region. The border is a productive zone through which artists explore the constitution of national and local identity at a time of the purported diminishment of the importance of national boundaries in globalization. She argues, against Hardt and Negri’s discussion of “empire,” that if the nation, in their analysis, is a mere “instrument” of global empire, then it stands to reason that the reassertion of borders would be a strategy for asserting lost state power. And the performance artists of Portable Borders engage the troubled dynamic of local and global flows of culture and power. Sheren’s work offers a unique proposition within border studies through the reexamination of the relationship between art and politics, in particular in terms of the role of art in social transformation. This book draws on a rich history of politically engaged art along the border, art that takes the physical zone as a point of departure, that examines borders and symbolic entities arising from this zone, and that addresses these questions globally as they relate to other international boundaries. In this study of border art, Sheren engages the work of Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez, the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, Grupo Proceso Pentágono, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Coco Fusco, David Avalos, La Pocha Nostra, along with artists such as Palestinian Mona Hatoum and Indian artist Amar [End Page 329] Kanwar, all of whom explore conceptual and actual borders. Portable Borders imagines a different future for border cultures and diverse strategies for addressing border problematics related to economic inequalities and social incongruities drawn across national lines, particularly for a major point of reference for border studies, the US-Mexico divide, but with regard to other global borders. Camilla Fojas Department of Latin Americana and Latino Studies DePaul University Copyright © 2016 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Latitudes: New Indian Transnational Cinema

This article examines films and video art that speak to conditions of exile and displacement, including the work of Mona Hatoum, Sonali Gulati, and Onir. It proposes the term “latitude” to interrogate the aesthetic and formal properties of these artworks, seeking to understand how lesbian and same-sex eroticism and identities are central to their efficacy.

The locations of memory: Migration and transnational cultural memory as challenges for art history

Abstract In the contemporary world, a considerable number of artists are on the move, due to the triple processes of globalization, decolonization and migration. Migrant artists, and also cosmopolitan artists that travel widely, are transnational cultural workers with ties to several places. As ‘bridging persons’, migrant artists have more than one sense of home, and they play a seminal role in the translation between cultures, and in the transformations between the local and the global. However, the multiple cultural references in their works also raise the difficult question of the provenance of their art. This article addresses the issue of how transnational cultural memory is articulated in works by migrant artists, as well as how to access it analytically. After outlining the general issues concerning the impact of migration on contemporary art, the article explores the usefulness of three conceptual frameworks: hybridity (Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall); migratory aesthetics (Mieke Bal); and the notion of the work of art as a migrant’s event (Syed Manzurul Islam). Taking British Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum as my example, it is my contention that her exhibition ‘Interior Landscape’ (Venice, 2009) constitutes a migrant’s event.

Translation and the Passage to Politics in Contemporary Palestinian Art

Analyzing connections between art and politics, this article proposes that contemporary Palestinian art is a space of dissent that challenges consensus and creates new visions of belonging and new forms of subjectivity. It considers the way the installations and videowork of Mona Hatoum and Till Roeskens and translation in the poetry of Suheir Hammad bring together reflections on “subjective mapping.” Both subjective mapping and translation are shown to imply a passage to politics. The crossing of languages, genres and media in these different artworks therefore establishes an intermedial dialogue—not only between the artworks themselves, but also between subjective mapping and translation, visual art and poetry.

Impossible Intimacies: Towards a Visual Politics of “Touch” at the Israeli-Palestinian Border

The West Bank Wall (or ‘Separation Fence’) constructed by Israel along much of its border with the occupied West Bank offers a potent visual signifier of the divisive, restrictive and intrusive ways in which the Israeli occupation touches the everyday lives of Palestinians. Consequently, the Wall has become a prominent site of representational concern in Arab visual culture. This article examines two particular visual representations of the Israeli-Palestinian border, Mona Hatoum’s sculpture ‘Grater Divide’ and Simone Bitton’s film Wall, in order to explore the complex politics of encounter and representation that circulate around the border in these works. In doing so, it seeks to establish a broader understanding of the ways in which discursive and cultural boundaries might be negotiated and crossed in the service of an interdisciplinary model of Arab cultural studies.

A Spectral Universality: Mona Hatoum's Biopolitics of Abstraction

OCTOBER 133, Summer 2010, pp. 49–74. © 2010 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A delicate swath of fabric is laid in a protective vitrine, underscoring its fragility. At first the material appears to impart nothing of itself save fine-craftedness, its fibers woven into a network of threads interlocked in strong knots at regular intervals, meandering at the edges. But the object’s placement in a gallery at the Museum of Modern Art imposes a set of interpretive parameters. The repeating modules made by the fabric’s material, enclosed in a double border that mimics a frame, evoke the object so commonly encountered in that museum: the painted grid hanging vertically on the gallery wall. The object is a grid, and it isn’t. Certain of its characteristics, such as its horizontality, belie any status as a transcendental object of aesthetic autonomy, and in this sense the display evokes an anthropological exhibition context, or that of a craft museum. And it is blatantly material and tactile, exceeding a grid’s opticality. Its units are not rectilinear, but are irregular ovals, reliant on the warp and weft of the thread constituting them. The cells are not stamped out ready-made over the material that constitutes them; rather, each is the stuff of that very material.1 In this way the object’s materiality belongs to the tactile process of weaving. But this evocation of the craft of weaving is frustrated in turn. The excess strands at the fabric’s edge are in fact human hair, as is the grid embroidered over the cotton support. This object is not a piece of fabric, but an abject and precarious web of human tissue. How can the object suggest an

Translocation

there is a collective assemblage of enunciation: a machinic assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both plugged into an immense outside that is a multiplicity in any case. The distinction to be made is not at all between exterior to interior, which are always relative, changing, and reversible, but between different types of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate, and change places--machines, cogs, motors, and elements that are set in motion at a given moment, forming an assemblage productive of statements. -Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980) ONE/MULTIPLE In La clameur de l'Etre (1997), Alain Badiou launched an attack on (Gilles Deleuze's ontology, criticizing his category of univocity as reinstalling transcendence. (1) Two years later, Mogens Laerke situated the Deleuzian ontology between being as the multiplicity of actual events, and being as a unitary virtual structure, namely, the One. (2) Univocity, argued Laerke, is not a principle but an affirmation of the multiplicity of reproduction and the production of sense. Badiou rejected all concepts of unity while insisting on multiplicity as such, being as multiple pur, the disordered and discontinuous ensemble of actual events. This debate outlines a crucial moment in both the thought and production of images as reflective of the constitution of self as an aggregated machine. Rooted in Friedrich Nietzsche, the dismantled amalgamate is described clearly in The Will to Power (1901) where Nietzsche argues that the I, the subject, lost faith in his own value when no infinitely valuable whole worked through him. ... (3) Nietzche's call to free the I from the illusionary assumption of unity became an Archimedian turning point that shifted the subject's self-establishment from the external transcendent to the multiple self. The recognition of the self as a plurality of events characterizes theories representing the human condition as heterogeneity folded within itself. This opposes an ontology predicated on the transcendent, i.e., an external establishing mechanism that demands unity. Two recent artworks, Shit in Your Hat--Head on a Chair (1990) by Bruce Nauman and Corps etranger (1994) by Mona Hatoum, embrace these ideas while revealing a ruptured, fragmented self as assemblage. These artists employ a practice of continuous synthesis, using fragmentation and later modification of the external and internal mental pictures that construct our world and self-perception. In these works, external systems are broken, while the human body, their underlying and guiding machinery, is dismantled and exhausted. They are unique in that they keep the spectator in constant flux, and cast aside the barriers to understanding the self as multiple. The desire to establish the self through the idea of unity is an ancient dilemma articulated in the tension between totality and its parts, between Metaphysics and Materialism. Consider, for example, the ancient Egyptian story of Osiris's bodily dismemberment as a revealing moment of divine and worldly transformation, where the idea of unity disables and taboos an aggregate perception grounded in multiple autonomous entities. Conversely, the early modernist concepts of rupture, wounding, splitting, and differentiation have given way to contemporary notions of multiplicity, disintegration, destruction, and fragmentation. These processes direct the focus internally, to the self, while appearing to maintain constant tension with the external source of authority. (4) TRANSLOCATED IMAGES The tension between the fragmented multiple and its unification operates through the constant act of dismantlement and construction of world images within the human mind. Here, human perception is bound to the operation of taking apart external images, reducing them to signals that in turn are transferred into different regions of the brain, only to be re-established into new electrical signals in the neuronal system that reconstructs and modifies a coherent picture. …

A Search for Belonging in the Exile's World: Mona Hatoum Exhibition at Parasol Unit

(2009). A Search for Belonging in the Exile's World: Mona Hatoum Exhibition at Parasol Unit. TEXTILE: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 262-267.

Imagining the Arab World: The Fashioning of the “War on Terror” through Art

Imagining the Arab WorldThe Fashioning of the “War on Terror” through Art Maymanah Farhat (bio) Not since the popularity of European Orientalist paintings in the nineteenth century has there been such vast interest in the Arab world in Western art scenes. In the United States this is evident in the increased number of exhibitions held in museums, commercial galleries, and nonprofit art spaces over the last decade. A noticeable trend in the organization of these events is the representation of the region via themes that can be likened to ethnographic studies or political debates rather than serious examinations of formalistic or conceptual elements in art. More often than not, the exhibition format is used as a platform for exploring topics that have become synonymous with the Arab world and Islam through a Western political lens. This of course points to the late Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1978), which outlined the formation of a multidisciplinary discourse that was shaped by European Imperialism and subsequently informed Western perceptions. And while the effects of these exploits have remained in academia, as well as the arts and popular culture, it is virtually impossible for contemporary curators and cultural workers to shake off the paranoia and xenophobia of twenty-first century America. This sharpening focus on the arts has emerged alongside a shift in global affairs, namely the events of September 11, 2001, and the United States-led “War on Terror” and its campaign for a “New Middle East.” Extending further into Asia with the invasion of Afghanistan and the recent military operations executed in Pakistan, American foreign policy is thoroughly entrenched in the so-called Islamic world. That is not to say that what we are witnessing is a new-found phenomenon in American political affairs, but that it has been greatly intensified and is all the more audacious. And while the United States has been involved in such operations in the region for decades, its cultural sector has only recently begun to take notice. To understand these changes, one must first examine the history of Arab art within the context of the American art world. This narrative can be divided into two distinct periods, before and after 2001. A look at the American cultural atmosphere prior to the United States’ recent launch of military strikes in the Middle East and Central and South Asia reveals a different, albeit equally discriminatory, experience for artists. Although active in the United States for decades, Arab artists have been consistently shut out from the mainstream. Attempting to work within a notoriously exclusionary art scene, many have sought to carve out their own paths, often through independent initiatives and nonprofit cultural organizations. An example of this is prominent Palestinian painter Samia Halaby, who has been based in the United States since the 1950s and is known in artistic and academic circles alike. Although Halaby’s abstract canvases are housed in the [End Page 1223] collections of some of the country’s leading institutions, such as the Guggenheim Musuem of Art and the Chicago Institute of Art, she has frequently turned to alternative spaces to exhibit her work exploring the Palestinian situation. In the rare instances that museum shows focusing on Arab art were held prior to 2001, censorship and politics inevitably factored in. In 1994, Halaby was part of a volunteer committee that assembled a stellar lineup of Arab female artists living in the United States and abroad. The show, titled Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World, included established artists such as Palestinian conceptualist Mona Hatoum, Palestinian painter Laila al Shawa, and Bahraini painter Balqees Fakhro, and was held at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. According to one of the women that served on the organizing committee, the idea of presenting an all-Arab show to an American audience was initially deemed too controversial. Efforts were made to subdue the overall image of the exhibition by the museum, and a struggle to keep the word “Arab” out of the title ensued. Eventually the committee held its ground and the title remained. Other instances demonstrated that even when a museum and organization seemed to be working on an...

Abjection and the politics of feminist and queer subjectivities in contemporary art

This article reads some familiar examples of contemporary visual arts, such as Cindy Sherman, Mona Hatoum, Robert Gober, John Miller, Eva Hesse, Orlan and Robert Mapplethorpe, by engaging with diff...

A Note on the Cover Art: Fathering "Garden"

I want the meaning to be imbedded in the material that I'm using. I choose the material as an extension of the concept or sometimes in opposition to it, to create a contradictory and paradoxical situation of attraction/repulsion, fascination and revulsion. (Mona Hatoum, Interview with Mona Hatoum) How can one imbibe in paint something as complex as the civil war that is tearing apart the fabric of Algerian society? How can one read this special issue Algeriad with a critical terminology of tragic experience, individual identity and the human condition? The question is one not so much of desire as of revulsion: How does one come to deliver the sense of what a person like Rachida is, who has had to endure so much pain and suffering? In presenting the case of her letter with the brush on the canvas, one must grapple with the in:possible, for painting an image, say, Garden, is as elusive as trying to come to grips with the tragic reality one encounters in the streets of Algiers. Further, the paradox that defines the tragedy and the painting lies hidden in the exchange and circulation between the subject and object (of the letter). Marcel Duchamp put it perceptively when he spoke of the co-efficient in personal art. By this he meant the gap between what the artist intends and what is physically realized. Garden was fathered out of a love for the subject of beauty that is barred and denied in the repulsive horror. The appeal also stems from my capacity to empathize with the subject telling her story late into the night to a stranger. Sensing that the tragic experience of her family is in some way exemplary, I reach for colors of value to corroborate it. All this illuminates the articulated practice responding to the difference between the objects and setting them down in a kind of rupture, culminating in the cartographic gaze, the head and hands, the parts that best reveal the passions of the soul. Rachida narrates her tragic experience with courage. Reading her story forced me to face her plight in paint.What struck me at once is the intense care for the self that is woven in the lyrics of her song-like testimony, hence my raw emotional response, which manifests itself in the monochromatic gray that is reversed when placed against the faded yellow background whereby the male figure is isolated. The red petals further enhance the force of the image, but not without contradictions: the intense pink and red gravitate with grace against the gray and yellow to make possible a certain sense of hope and rejuvenation. The image is also violently contrasting and contradictory, suggesting a fierce urgency and deep emotion. The male figure is pouring the rose petals with the utmost care in what can be viewed as an act of nurturing, sowing, and fertilizing. …

A Revolution in Art Publishing

Mona Hatoum, Mark Dion and Christian Boltanski Contemporary Artists

Troubling Presence: Body, Sound and Space in Installation Art of the mid-1990s

Cet article examine l’art de l’installation au milieu des années quatre-vingt-dix. Il s’intéresse surtout aux projets de Maud Sulter, tout en discutant aussi des travaux de Sutapa Biswas, de Chila Kumari Burman, de Mona Hatoum, de Lubaina Himid, de Susan Hiller, de Cornelia Parker et de Tilda Swinton. L’idée directrice développe les inscriptions multiples dans l’art de l’installation de la présence et les implications complexes de la présence de l’artiste, des figures convoquées par ce dernier, ou même par les participants. L’intérêt ne consiste pas à simplement identifier la présence qui pourrait s’opposer simplement à l’absence, mais à considérer comment l’installation comme forme artistique remet en question et conteste la nature même de la présence. On demande souvent aux participants d’une installation d’entendre et d’écouter autant que de voir, de toucher, d’être touchés, de sentir et de se mouvoir dans des espaces et des temporalités différentes. Cette participation physique et sensorielle, de même que la capacité de l’installation à reconfigurer le temps et l’espace, ont été critiques dans le déploiement postcolonial de cette pratique, sensible aux identités instables et fluctuantes de la diaspora et aux questions d’histoire et de géographie. L’art de l’installation est aussi considéré à l’intérieur des débats actuels des théories culturelles, particulièrement aux glissements de la vision et de la visualité vers l’intérêt récent pour le corps et les sens. S’appuyant sur les écrits de Jacques Derrida, cet article conclut en proposant une nouvelle réflexion sur les rapports entre les sens, les croisements et les juxtapositions entre l’acte de voir et celui d’entendre.

Real Bodies: Video in the 1990s

This article discusses the recent work of three artists, Gary Hill, Mona Hatoum and Maureen Connor, to address the meaning of the aesthetic shift in video art of the 1990s and its implications for thinking about the body as a site of identification and identity. Engaging (and reformulating) the Lacanian notion of the Real, it explores the effects of the new kind of corpo‐reality proposed by these video installations on the ways in which we imagine our relation to our own bodies as mediated by visual culture. In so far as it raises the spectre of flesh as a culturally inassimilable remnant, the aesthetic concern with the Real may be seen as a response to a certain conceptual impasse in thinking about identity as an effect of cultural construction. This is not, however, a matter of retreating into essentialist positions, strategically useful as such positions may be. To imagine the ‘lived body’ as Real – as the work of these artists suggests – is to explore the idea of unfinishedness of the self as a specific body, and to envision the instability of the internal psychic boundaries as a concrete embodied experience. Video as a medium is particularly well suited to address such issues as one of the technologies that have contributed to the transformation of contemporary reality into, predominantly, visuality. Focusing on each artist's different mode of involvement with the Real as a body, the article examines the attempts of these video installations to construct a new aesthetic of the subject in the era of screen.

Measures of Distance. Director-Producer Mona Hatoum for Western Front Video Productions. 15-minute VHS. 1988. Available from Women Make Movies, Inc., 225 Lafayette Street, Suite 212, New York, NY 10012. (212) 925–0606.

Measures of Distance. Director-Producer Mona Hatoum for Western Front Video Productions. 15-minute VHS. 1988. Available from Women Make Movies, Inc., 225 Lafayette Street, Suite 212, New York, NY 10012. (212) 925–0606.

Éxito, (hiper)visibilidad, ambivalencia: las instalaciones de Mona Hatoum

A finales de los años ochenta Mona Hatoum decidió abandonar la performance y el vídeo para hacer instalaciones. Este artículo analiza las condiciones en que se produjo este cambio examinando el contexto en el que las instalaciones adquirieron éxito y visibilidad. Hatoum realizó estas obras en un momento en el que el arte político parecía haber entrado en crisis, al menos en la escena artística londinense. Debido a su estética minimalista, las instalaciones jugaron un papel ambivalente pues, dependiendo de dónde se exhibiesen, el compromiso político que pretendían materializar quedaba fácilmente desactivado. El artículo propone que esta ambivalencia está inextricablemente vinculada a las estrategias desarrolladas por Hatoum para encontrar su lugar en un sistema del arte especialmente preocupado por institucionalizar la diferencia cultural.