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One of the most influential artists of the last century, Louise Bourgeois (Born 1911 in Paris; died 2010 in New York) has produced a distinctive oeuvre over her seventy-year career, combining abstraction and figuration and a wide array of media to explore sexuality, the body, everyday life, and trauma.

Cell (Hands and Mirror) is from a series of large-scale sculptures Bourgeois made when she was in her eighties. Each “cell” is a room that viewers are prompted to peer into, where they discover highly symbolic arrangements of sculptures and found objects. In Cell (Hands and Mirror), the interior walls are painted blue, and two realistically sculpted arms rest on a piece of marble and press into each one another. The color, forms, and inclusion of mirrors imply a clinical and inhospitable environment, in which the dismembered body parts are submitted to scrutiny and voyeurism.

Since introducing Bourgeois to Boston audiences in a 1953 group exhibition, the ICA/Boston has featured her work in a number of exhibitions, including the major 2007–08 solo show titled Bourgeois in Boston.

Creation through disintegration, presence through absence, fullness through emptiness—such paradoxes inspire the work of the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia (Born 1970 in Dugny, France). He succinctly describes his artistic aim: “I am interested in the evocation of something through its contrary.” To give form to the idea, he puts unexpected juxtapositions of contradictory elements to powerful visual and visceral effect.

Attia’s video Oil and Sugar #2 harnesses layered meanings through the marriage of simple and familiar materials, each selected for the distinct sensual/formal and cultural/political significations it embodies. His camera records in real time a close-up view of crystalline cubes of sugar stacked like bricks on a silver platter. Motor oil is poured onto the structure they form, and as the white solid absorbs the black liquid, it crumbles and pools in the platter as a glistening, viscous mass. Disintegrating the sweet, bite-sized sugar cubes with the crude fuel that powers so much of our contemporary activity, Attia presents a sensually seductive image of destruction, rife with open-ended metaphors in the realms of art, religion, and politics. He describes the form of the white cube as “the core symbol of art, of the space of art, of the institution.” Drenched in oil and rendered black, the structure evokes the Kaaba, the Islamic holy site circled by pilgrims on their annual Hajj to Mecca. Once dissolved by oil, it calls to mind the ongoing destruction and violence sparked by religious and political difference and competition for fossil fuel resources in the Middle East. Composed with contrasting color, texture, form, and temporal flow, Oil and Sugar #2 instills beauty in collapse, seduction in destruction, through means both direct and resonant.

First screened in Boston during the run of Attia’s 2007 ICA/Boston exhibition Momentum 9: Kader Attia, Oil and Sugar #2 shares conceptual and formal parallels with other works in the museum’s collection, including the slow-motion parable of Paul Chan’s digital animation 1st Light, 2005, and the paradoxical balance in Tara Donovan’s cube, Untitled (Pins), 2003.

Kai Althoff (Born 1966 in Cologne, Germany) borrows from history, religious iconography, and countercultural movements to create imaginary environments that commingle paintings, sculpture, drawing, video, and found objects. Tapping a multitude of sources—from Germanic folk traditions to recent popular culture, from medieval and Gothic religious imagery to early modern expressionism—Althoff places his characters in fantastic realms that serve as allegories for human experience and emotion.

In Untitled, Althoff depicts a skateboarder caught midair within a field of luminous orange painted on a striped fabric support. The border between the monochromatic field and the fabric forms the curved edge of the ramp over which the body of the skateboarder hovers, somewhere between flying and falling. In taking on this emblem of youth culture, Althoff captures a moment of ecstasy and risk. As with so many of his works, this simple yet striking image suggests the emotional charge involved in an experience of the self (the lone skateboarder) in relation to the socially defined group (a particular form of youth culture). The work also reflects the artist’s exploration of different pictorial styles and painterly techniques.

Kai Althoff’s first U.S. museum exhibition was held at the ICA/Boston in 2004. This work, made that year, was one of the first paintings to enter the ICA’s collection, and documents the institution’s exhibition history and reflect its commitment to emerging contemporary artists.

Based in London, over the past thirty years Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum (Born 1962 in Beirut) has frequently used the body, including her own, in photographic, filmic, and performative work that explores issues related to identity. Since the 1990s, she has also transformed common household objects—rugs, cots, and kitchen utensils—into threatening large-scale sculptures. Items from the domestic territory become ambiguous and potentially dangerous, evoking themes of exile, displacement, and conflict.

In Van Gogh’s Back, the conversion of the ordinary (hair) into the extraordinary (art) is uncharacteristically playful. Throughout her career, Hatoum has used and referenced hair, applying strands to paper as a form of drawing and integrating the material into sculptural work. While hair is often associated with femininity and sensuality, once removed from the body it takes on an abject quality. In Van Gogh’s Back, Hatoum uses the biomaterial in yet another way. With what appears to be soap, the long hairs on a man’s back have been shaped into curls that reprise Vincent van Gogh’s signature thick, swirling brushstrokes in his seminal Starry Night (1889). As in Hatoum’s early performance work, the human body functions as canvas and sculpture, here to amusing effect.

London-based Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum (Born 1952 in Beirut) has long associated the familiar with the uncanny in an arresting and visceral oeuvre. In the 1980s, she made video and performance works that explore political, ethnic, and personal identity through the body, often her own. At the end of the 1980s, she began to focus on common domestic objects—including kitchen utensils and house furnishings—that she transmogrified into hostile large-scale sculptures. The domestic interior is no longer a place of protection and safety but the locus of ambiguous and foreboding mutation. In metaphorical terms, the transformation of the known into the threatening replicates the psychological effects of displacement, exile, and violence.

Perhaps the most defining feature of Hatoum’s work is her generation of multiple readings by means of simple transformative gestures. This is the case with T42, a pair of teacups fused together at the rim to create one drinking reservoir. The conjoining of the cups brings to mind the civility associated with tea drinking along with an image of the forced collaboration involved in sharing a vessel. In more political terms, the form can be construed as a metaphor of egalitarianism, a social condition in which resources are equally distributed and cooperation is demanded. But the twin-handled cup also conjures a possible battle over limited resources, a tug-of-war in which the contents of the vessel go to the victor.

In her work over the past three decades, London-based Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum (Born 1952 in Beirut) has often employed elements from the fragmented or eviscerated human body to elicit instinctual responses from viewers, creating jarring effects through suggestive textural and visual associations. In the 1980s, she used her own body in video and performance work to explore national, political, and psychological identity. During the following decade, she began to transform commonplace household objects into large-scale sculptures that in scale and material construction resemble instruments of torture. In these works, domestic territory is no longer a place of protection and safety, but one of foreboding and confusion. The implicit themes in the transformation of objects that remind one of “home” but have turned ominous are national and ethnic exile, displacement, and conflict.

Attracted by the glistening surface of Rubber Mat, we see on closer inspection that the spongy silicone has been molded to resemble coiled intestines. Although a welcome mat typically serves as an invitation to enter a home, Hatoum’s bizarre version invites only to repel. The artist fuses the pliant silicone and vivid bodily image to activate and conflate our sense of touch and feelings of disgust.

Over the past three decades, London-based Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum (Born 1952 in Beirut) has focused on the narrow divide between the familiar and the uncanny. In the 1980s, she made video and performance work that position her body as the locus for an exploration of political and psychological identities. During the 1990s, she began to transform commonplace household objects—rugs, cots, or kitchen utensils—into large-scale sculptures that resemble threatening and monstrous instruments of torture. With these sculptures, Hatoum envisions a domestic territory that is not a place of protection and safety, but one of ambiguity and foreboding, suggesting themes of exile, displacement, and conflict.

Hatoum made Pom Pom City while living in Mexico as she was preparing for exhibitions in Mexico City and Oaxaca. During two month-long periods, she created works that draw on local curiosities, Mexican folklore, and traditional craftsmanship. Pom Pom City is made with natural wool from artisan weavers in Teotitlán del Valle in Oaxaca, an area known for its hand-woven rugs. Hatoum’s piece is an oversized rug, exhibited directly on the gallery floor. At the sculpture’s center is an interlocking grid of fibers, a reference to the tightly gridded plan of central Mexico City. Long strands of wool radiate from this point like rivers, roads, or tentacles, representing the chaos and growth surrounding the city. Each strand ends in a pom pom, calling to mind kitschy souvenir sombreros or other tourist trinkets. Like many of Hatoum’s sculptures, Pom Pom City plays with scale: in other works she has vastly enlarged a baby crib, a cheese grater, and the colorful birdcage exhibited in the ICA/Boston’s Made in Mexico (2004).

Mona Hatoum (Born 1952 in Beirut) belongs to a group of artists that also includes Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Doris Salcedo, and Rachel Whiteread, whose works defamiliarize everyday forms, transforming them into minimalist, conceptual, and often performative objects. Working across a variety of mediums, Hatoum often extricates the familiar forms of the domestic landscape—an armoire, chaise, or rug—from their normal context. Through the juxtaposition of contradictory materials, changes of scale, or the introduction of uncharacteristic elements, she infuses the familiar with an element of danger, references to violence, or the capability of producing bodily harm. By employing these transformative gestures, Hatoum engages viewers’ tactile imagination—her sculptures, photographs, and videos provoke viewers to imagine their own bodies in relation to these unruly objects. The myriad and often conflicting allusions simultaneously speak to the history of violence in the artist’s Palestinian homeland and the safety provided by the domestic realm.

Hatoum has created a series of “carpets” that refer to the minimalist floor sculptures of artists such as Carl Andre, traditional Muslim prayer rugs, and functional carpets. Pin Rug is composed of thousands of straight pins pushed through a needlepoint canvas. The combination of the dark support and the glistening pins gives the visual effect of a soft, lush surface. Though evoking an inviting carpet, like many of Hatoum’s sculptures, the object would cause pain if one were to stand or sit on it. Pin Rug subtly illustrates the dualities that mark Hatoum’s work: seduction and repulsion, pain and pleasure, religion and belief.

Over the course of her career, London-based Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum (Born 1952 in Beirut) has produced a powerfully visceral body of work. She came to notice in the 1980s for video and performance work in which her body served as the vehicle for an exploration of political and personal identity. During the 1990s, she turned her focus to ordinary household objects such as furnishings and tools, transforming them into monumental sculptures that arouse a sense of threat. With these uncanny sculptures, Hatoum divests domestic territory of its comfort and safety. As the objects that initially evoke “home” become ominous, the process inspires reflection on the global themes of exile, displacement, and conflict.

Natura Morta (Edwardian Vitrine) consists of beautifully crafted, colorful Murano glass objects arranged inside an Edwardian wooden cabinet. At first glance, the seductive mirrored-glass objects resemble crystal fruits—a pomegranate, a pineapple, or perhaps a lemon. However, these jewel-colored objects are blown and hand-shaped to resemble hand grenades, small bombs that disperse lethal fragments on detonation. By using a particularly seductive mirrored glass as the objects’ material and placing them inside a common domestic cabinet, Hatoum converts the appealing and familiar into the threatening and deadly. Her alienating treatment of the home arouses feelings of displacement that respond to the reality of many who live in the midst of constant war and violence.

Over her career, London-based Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum (Born 1952 in Beirut) has produced work that treads the line between the familiar and the uncanny via the body and the objects it comes into contact with. During the late 1980s, she moved from performance and video to large-scale sculptures and installations in which household items—kitchen utensils, rugs, cots, and tools—become threatening and aggressive. Objects that initially remind one of the comforts of “home” turn ominous, an alienation evoking the experience of exile, displacement, and conflict.

Do unto others… is a polished metal boomerang put on formal display in the gallery context. The boomerang originated in Australia as a tool for hunting as well as sport and entertainment. Hatoum’s gleaming sculpture eschews the warm organic wood typical of boomerangs in favor of surgical stainless steel, a material change that lends the object the appearance of a blade, scalpel, or scythe. The title refers to the golden rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” When thrown, a boomerang performs the operation detailed by the maxim by returning to the thrower’s hand. However, to catch this blade-like version of the boomerang would undoubtedly cause harm to the wielder. With Do unto others… Hatoum seems to suggest a negative invocation of the “golden rule,” a reading more akin to “an eye for an eye,” in which violent acts, and not good deeds, are reciprocated.