CHICAGO — Mona Hatoum’s well-known sculptural installations have no place in the current survey Early Works at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, and it is precisely that absence that drives this exacting exhibition. Instead, several television monitors and projected videos occupy two intimate galleries. Works is an appropriate title to encompass these films, most of which document the grueling, embodied performances Hatoum undertook throughout the 1980s. “The Negotiating Table” (1983) records the artist’s body as she visibly breathes beneath a clear plastic tarp evidently covered in blood. As she lies atop a wooden table flanked by two empty chairs, the tinny sounds of world leaders emanate from a television, their echo increasingly loud in the darkened space, uttering words like “peace,” “negotiations,” and “billions of dollars of arms overseas.” Less literal, “Changing Parts” (1984) juxtaposes still images of her mother’s bathroom in Beirut with grainy monochrome footage of a performance in which the artist struggles through another fluid-smeared membrane, classical music clashing with staticky news reports.
Hatoum makes clear that separation from loved ones during wartime is painful, sometimes beyond words. That might also be the subject of “So much I want to say” (1983), playing on a small monitor in a darkened corner of the blackbox space. The work shows moiréd monochrome stills of the artist restrained by hands over her mouth, accompanied by a recording of her repeating the titular line. Around the corner, “Measures of Distance” (1988), the latest video in the show, layers transparencies of letters Hatoum’s mother wrote to her over photos of her in the shower. The artist reads the letters aloud in English over a recording of the two of them chatting over coffee during a visit to Beirut.
The Beirut-born Palestinian artist was visiting London when the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975 and she became doubly displaced, forced to live in the heart of the former empire that had ceded her homeland to Zionism in 1948. Performed in London, the rarely screened “Roadworks” (1985) documents the artist walking the streets of the Afro-Caribbean neighborhood of Brixton. Though barefoot, she drags black leather combat boots behind her, the laces tied to her ankles. Worn by skinheads and police alike, the footwear would have been inseparable from the images of police brutality in the minds of the Black Brixtonites who rioted against the rampant stop-and-frisk measures of the spring of 1981. The baffled expressions of passersby emphasize the absurdity of Hatoum’s gesture while signaling the indifference with which White Londoners regarded the violence endured by the displaced immigrants.
What unifies these works is the juxtaposition of presence and absence — the presence of the body, the absence of the faraway conflict; the presence of the daughter, the absence of the mother; the presence of the artist, the absence of objects. Later, Hatoum would invert this formula, making sculptures that so explicitly lack the human form that a beholder might feel called to fill its absence. Early Works instead confronts viewers with the body of the artist as a synecdoche not only for the collective trauma experienced by the dispossessed, but for all of our complicity — intentional or not — in enabling a world in which the pain of others is merely a spectacle to be watched on a screen.
Mona Hatoum: Early Works continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) through October 22. The exhibition was curated by Bana Kattan, Pamela Alper Associate Curator, MCA Chicago.