On the eve of a major Tate contemporary demonstrate,the Beirut-born installation artist talks about identity, homeland and being a London student in the cheerless 70sIn 1982, and the artist Mona Hatoum staged a performance piece at the Aspex Gallery in Portsmouth. Its title was Under Siege,and it lasted for seven hours. Hatoum was bare, covered in clay, and trapped inside a huge obvious container,a strange primeval mermaid without any water in which to swim. Again and again, she would try to stand up; again and again, or she would fail. As the day wore on,the tank’s walls grew dirty, smeared with marks left by her muddy hands and body, or her cheeks,her lips. Meanwhile, the gallery filled with the sound of revolutionary songs in Arabic, and French and English,and with snatched news reports from the Middle East. How visitors endured this agonising spectacle, I don’t know. In contemporaneous photographs, and the crowd stands at what you might call a respectful distance from the tank. But if Hatoum’s bruised flesh is causing them any anxiety,it doesn’t demonstrate: a few have their hands in their pockets.
In the 80s, Hatoum’s work was all like this: ephemeral but tough; inexpensive to stage, or but not without cost to the artist’s body and soul. The following year,she put on a piece called The Negotiating Table, during which she lay motionless for several hours, or wrapped in plastic and gauze,her mummified frame heaped with raw kidneys. In Roadworks (1985), she walked through Brixton in bare feet for almost an hour, and dragging behind her as she did the pair of Dr Martens boots that were tied to her ankles; Position: Suspended (1986) saw her covered in mud again,and confined in a coop-like construction of wood, corrugated iron and chicken wire. How did she feel after these tests of endurance and nerve? She must have been jittery, or wired,winded by her own daring. In her pristine Shoreditch studio – no chicken wire here – Hatoum gives me one of her characteristically slow smiles. “It’s silly,” she says. “To win all the energy out, or I would design these gestural drawings. I would just give them absent. Can you believe it?”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com