Lisa Randall is the first female in history to hold tenure for an academic position in Physics at Harvard University. Born in Lebanon in the 1950s to a Palestinian family, Hatoum now lives and works in London and Berlin. Her works are realised in a diverse and unconventional range of subverted media from sculpture, video, installation and works on paper and have been widely exhibited all over the world. Hatoum started out as a video and performance artist with her work focusing on the site and intensity of the body, however since the 1980s and 1990s her work has shifted towards large scale sculptural installation. Her installation based practice engages the viewer in a polarity of emotions; desire and revulsion, fear and curiosity, the illusion of safety and the ominous onset of threat. Mona Hatoum's own personal experience of exile, war and displacement find their way into her minimalist yet conceptually loaded sculptural installation work. Exploring themes of violence, oppression, dislocation and vulnerability, she uses banal everyday objects in her installation works. Hatoum transforms these household objects by modifying their scale or infusing them with electrical charge, thereby alluding to the political significance and power structures that imbue the notion of 'home' and the transformative and menacing divergence that displacement can create; where 'home' is stripped from comfort and familiarity and what remains is threat, hostility and danger. In Undercurrent (Red), Hatoum utilizes the form of a carpet to create a field traversed by strong electrical voltage, that buzzes on an off as if to allude to it being alive. Traditionally associated with the idea of prayer or of domestic warmth, Hatoum’s carpet, in contrast, becomes a potentially lethal microcosm that, instead of being a site of solace and comfort invariably becomes a dangerous threatening object, pushing away those who approach. The subtle shifts between power and vulnerability are beautifully articulated in this work and are hallmark traits of the emotional polarities embodied in the poetic clarity and daunting political realities Hatoum confronts us with. Her work is contemporary and dynamic sitting at the forefront of our collective contemplation and confrontation of place and belonging, identity and wholeness, hostility and home. By Suzi Elhafez 2015 Mona Hatoum explains how her work, 'Undercurrent', at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014 is an attempt to show that all objects are teeming with energy. She talks about her preference for art residencies and how interacting with people and objects are important to her artistic practice.
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Suzi Elhafez
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