Mona Hatoum
12 March - 28 April 2011
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| © Mona Hatoum
Inteior/Exterior Landscape (detail), 2011
Mixed media
Dimensions variable
Installation: Witness, Beirut Art Center
Photo: Agop Kanledjian |
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MONA HATOUM
Bourj
12 March – 28 April, 2011
An exhibition of recent works by Mona Hatoum will open at Alexander and
Bonin on March 12th. The works on view were created initially for
exhibitions in Amman, Venice and Beirut. This will be Hatoum’s fifth
solo exhibition with Alexander and Bonin.
Bourj, the Arabic word for ‘tower,’ is the title of a work Hatoum
created for a solo exhibition at the Beirut Art Center in 2010. This
basic building structure is made up of stacked steel rectangular tube
sections which have been subjected to cutting and burning giving it the
appearance of a building scarred by war. This work utilizes an altered
grid structure, which Hatoum has previously explored in seminal works
such as Light Sentence (1992), Current Disturbance (1996), which is
currently showing at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, as well as her
2008 Cube (9x 9 x9) recently on view in "On Line” at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. In the case of Bourj there is an underlying tone
of irony as the work’s maquette-like scale suggests a future
construction project in which signs of destruction are already present.
Featured in the exhibition is Interior/Exterior Landscape (2010), a
room-size installation of altered household furniture. A bed frame
threaded with long wiry hair remains bare save for a hair-embroidered
pillow at the head that depicts flight routes between the artist’s most
visited cities. Two circular wire hangers framing wall drawings of the
Eastern and Western hemispheres and a market bag constructed from a
cut-out print of a world map hang from a metal coat rack. A merged table
and chair sit against a corner and a birdcage housing a single ball of
hair hangs on the adjacent wall.
3-D Cities (2008-2009) consists of printed maps of the cities of Beirut,
Baghdad and Kabul mounted on tables linked by wooden trestles. The
surface of the maps have several delicately cut-out parts that create
concave and convex areas referring to the cycle of destruction and
rebuilding that these cities have gone (and still go) through. The
recessed areas can be seen as a metaphor for bomb craters or
construction sites and the protrusions can be a representation of
explosions or architectural structures rising again from the rubble.
Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut and has lived and
worked in London since 1975. Her video, drawings, sculpture and
installation works have been widely exhibited throughout the world.
Since 1994, there have been more than twenty solo museum and
institutional exhibitions of her work, the largest and most
comprehensive of which was a survey initiated by the Hamburger
Kunsthalle that also traveled to Kunstmuseum Bonn, Magasin 3 Stockholm
Konsthall, and the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art (2004 - 05). Hatoum
was Artist-in-Residence on the DAAD program (Berliner Künstlerprogramm,
Deutscher Akademischer Austrauschdienst) in 2003-2004 and has since
divided her time between Berlin and London. Her work has also been shown
in the Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005), the 1995 Istanbul Biennial, and
Documenta XI in 2002. She was recently awarded the 2011 Joan Miró
Prize, Barcelona. Concurrent with the Alexander and Bonin exhibition,
White Cube will present two large installations by Hatoum (February 24 -
April 2) in Mason’s Yard, London.
www.alexanderandbonin.com
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