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Course: Tate > Unit 2
Lesson 5: Creating ContradictionMona Hatoum's self-contradictory objects
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Palestinian, London-based artist Mona Hatoum creates art that challenging our perceptions of everyday objects. "Often my work is about conflict and contradiction, and that contradiction can be within the actual object," she explains. One of her sculptures is a simple wheelchair, an unremarkable object apart from the fact that its handles have been replaced with knives. Another is a baby’s cot, but one with the bottom taken out and replaced with taut, menacing wires. Sometimes the materials she works with are unexpected, like the soap she used to draw a map of a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine.
Palestinian, London-based artist Mona Hatoum creates art that challenging our perceptions of everyday objects. "Often my work is about conflict and contradiction, and that contradiction can be within the actual object," she explains. One of her sculptures is a simple wheelchair, an unremarkable object apart from the fact that its handles have been replaced with knives. Another is a baby’s cot, but one with the bottom taken out and replaced with taut, menacing wires. Sometimes the materials she works with are unexpected, like the soap she used to draw a map of a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine.
There are many internal contradictions at work in Hatoum’s art. What purpose do they serve? Do they get you thinking about commonplace objects in uncommon ways?
Click here to learn more about Mona Hatoum and her work.
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Such irony that the artist is taking measures to make the soap artwork with the map permanent! The whole point of the artwork was to convey a sense of impermanence and ephemerality! What do other viewers think about that?(8 votes)
Yes, it is quite ironic. She seems to be attempting to convey the impermanence of the Israeli-Palestinian agreement, but has been driven to employ materials that are more durable than those which were originally utilized, in order that her artwork will endure longer, so that she can communicate her message longer. Very ironic indeed.(7 votes)
Where does she get funding?(1 vote)
Video transcript
[Music] my name is Monica - and we are in my Berlin studio I don't consider myself very much to be a studio based artist because I tend to work in many different situations this is the the largest room in my studio as you can see it's a shopfront which is quite nice on the ground floor I like to be occupied on a daily basis making things myself mostly making very small discrete objects this is something actually from an installation called interior landscape now it's falling apart so I've had to remake it so this is the kind of handmade things that we do in the studio this is the piece I made Annamma and enjoying you know going to junk shops and picking up pieces of furniture it's called static its people with static lives we just sit around in those kind of situations this is another room which was supposed to be an office this work on the floor it's called Bellucci blue we have taken taken the the pile out of certain areas so it looks like it's been worn out but then you realize that those patches make up the world map often the work is about conflict and contradiction and that conflict or contradiction can be within the actual object the work like untitled wheelchair on the one hand the person who would use this wheelchair would need someone to wheel them around but the the presence of the knives makes you think that they resent that dependence there's a whole kind of internal conflict happening within that piece and the work called incommunicado which is an infant cult it has these bars that are there for protection normally but when you approach it you realize that the the platform has been removed and instead you have these very taut wires so immediately your perception of the object turns into the opposite it's not anymore about protection it's more about you know a situation of abuse or danger sometimes the situation I'm working in can be politically charged for instance in 1996 I was doing an exhibition in Jerusalem and I came across this map of the Oslo agreement which was drawn between Israel and the Palestinians so I decided to actually draw this map on a bed of so maybe instinctively I did it on soap so that the implication is it's a temporary material and eventually it will dissolve and with it all these borders will disappear at the time we didn't think about conservation very much so it's all drying out and drinking and going brown so now what we're doing with the fresh soap is we're covering it too with liquitex to seal the moisture in so that hopefully it will stay like this I always say the most exciting thing about being an artist for me is that I never know where the next exhibition is going to take me to in the world and what I will end up making and I found this very exciting that not knowing [Music]