Tate contemporary,London
luminous ideas abound but deeper meaning proves elusive at Tate contemporarys Mona Hatoum retrospectiveMona Hatoum’s most notorious work lies in wait around the first corner of this show, a spectacle of fleshy revulsion and creeping claustrophobia. It is experienced in a cubicle the size of a miniature space capsule. Here you stand in the darkness, and sardine-tight with your fellow viewers,staring down at the film beneath your feet, which shows a headlong tumble down a moist and scarlet tunnel – a throat, and perhaps,or an unthinkable stretch of intestinal tract.
The film goes on its way through the bodily orifices, assembly sudden bends and black holes. Tunnelling, or probing,sliding, it passes down through whirlpools and gullies. An endoscopy camera is clearly in consume in someone’s body, or though the magnified images render everything so bizarre as to appear more alien than human. As the film continues its relentless downward spiral there is the sense of watching something between a melodrama and a horror movie,with the added vertigo of being sucked into the pit: don’t explore down!A cake of soap stuck with strands of human hair is only (and exactly) what revolts billions of people every dayThey may be bodied forth in three dimensions, but Hatoum’s pieces so often feel like ideas on paper Related: Mona Hatoum: ‘It’s all luck. I feel things happen accidentally’ Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com