Mona Hatoum
From the comparative safety of Australia, how can we truly comprehend the trauma that exists as a daily companion for those in war ravaged situations? A taxi driver from Somalia, a house cleaner from Bosnia, may be the only encounters in our daily lives from which we have the chance to glean life stories which explain the most pressing reasons why they have left their homelands. The narratives are usually brief and revealed only when probed.
Mona Hatoum was brought up in Beirut in a Palestinian family and was at art school in London when war broke out in Lebanon and she was compelled to stay put. This enforced exile, from 1975, informs all of her art practice as does the rage of gender inequality and perverse power relations. It is a powerful indicator of the world of migration, the increase in diasporic communities (based less on economic opportunism than on the human instinct for survival) and brings an unavoidable sense of displacement and loss. The environment she escaped is paradoxically that which formed the identity of her youth and that which betrayed its promise. Writing at his best, Sebastian Smee in a review for the Weekend Australian, states how Hatoum’s survey of twenty years, ‘suggests deep wells of vulnerability and tenderness among the despair and indignation. In her best works, her histrionic and didactic tendencies—her private psychology and her political convictions—are kept mutually in check’.1
I agree with Smee and it is understandable that in this survey of Hatoum the early 1980s performance works by her are comparatively crude and unrefined as though the urgency of recording (through film and still photography) takes precedence over refinements of