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London-based Palestinian Mona Hatoum 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.

T42 takes its place among works in the ICA/Boston’s growing sculpture collection that probe complex emotional and psychological states through simple forms. It also accompanies a number of other collection works by Mona Hatoum, as well as by artists such as Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, and Yasumasa Morimura that explore themes related to psychological as well as physical violence.

2014.23

In her work over the past three decades, London-based Palestinian Mona Hatoum 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.

Rubber Mat forms part of a significant representation of works by Hatoum in the ICA/Boston’s strong and expanding sculpture collection, and joins works that address themes of the body by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, and Nick Cave.

2014.22

Over the past three decades, London-based Palestinian Mona Hatoum 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).

This work is one of several works by Mona Hatoum owned by the ICA, and resonates with the many works in fiber in the collection by such artists as Sheila Hicks, Alexandre da Cunha, and Josh Faught.

2006.7

Mona Hatoum 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.

A compelling element in the ICA/Boston’s increasingly strong collection of sculpture, a cluster of works by Hatoum that includes Pin Rug forms part of a concentration of objects that investigate themes of war and violence by such artists as Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.20

Over the course of her thirty-year career, London-based Palestinian Mona Hatoum 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.

This powerful work, along with others by Mona Hatoum, complements holdings in the ICA/Boston’s growing sculpture collection and in works that investigate themes of conflict and violence by artists such as Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.19

For thirty years, London-based Palestinian Mona Hatoum 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.

This work forms part of the ICA/Boston’s strong and growing collection of sculpture, as well as the constellation of works that investigate themes of war and violence, including examples by artists such as Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.18

In performances, sculptures, installations, and photographs, Mona Hatoum investigates the layered issues of cultural and physical displacement, gender and ethnic identity, and the physical and social body. She is perhaps best known for her sculptures of ordinary yet emotionally charged domestic objects—kitchen implements, cribs, welcome mats. Blown up to gigantic proportions or made with unexpected materials such as rubber, steel, or pins, her sculptures evoke a shifting sense of danger and familiarity, as they are both physically enticing and a bit sinister.

This dynamic is at play in Dormeuse, a chaise longue made with steel tread plate. The chaise has been a key prop throughout art history, appearing in many well-known paintings––notably Jacques-Louis David’s Portrait de Mme Récamier, 1800––as a symbol of feminine leisure, relaxation, and economic privilege. Hatoum removes these associations from her sculpture, as well as the recumbent figure. While viewers cannot “complete” the work by lounging on it, it is apparent that it is not a place of rest and comfort. Its unforgiving surface paints a cold, hard portrait of domesticity. Hatoum transforms the chaise into the kind of sturdy utilitarian fixture that could be found in a subway station. The sculpture is archetypal Mona Hatoum, as it elegantly and subtly unravels the stereotype of the home as a refuge.

Dormeuse contributes to the representation of Hatoum’s work donated to the ICA/Boston by Barbara Lee, and augments the museum’s holdings of sculpture by important women artists.

2006.9

Kiki Smith has created a visceral oeuvre that positions the body as a site where history, identity, psychology, politics, and experience coalesce. Using a wide variety of organic materials and techniques, she often creates a dialogue between animal forms and fundamental human experience. Smith’s life-size figurative sculptures, frequently cast from live models, draw attention to human mortality by way of the systems (reproductive, excretory, vascular) whose vitality and decay are linked to life and death. While informed by the politics surrounding the AIDS epidemic, Smith’s practice also concerns feminist identity politics, as evidenced by her frequent use of the female form and reproductive system.

Throughout her oeuvre, Smith has often invoked bodily fluids, most notably blood and semen, to draw attention to the raw physicality as well as psychological pain, of human existence. The delicate paper sculpture Heart to Hand is an early work in which Smith externalizes internal processes, both psychic and physical. Red ink on gampi paper is manipulated to resemble wrinkled and bloodied viscera. The disembodied titular hand and heart hang freely on the wall, connected via a spindly red umbilical artery. While the sculpture makes self-referential allusion to channels of artistic creation, it also references Bruce Nauman’s From Hand to Mouth—a similar sculpture of a human arm and mouth that likewise seeks to represent the psychological divide between the manifest and the metaphoric.

The addition of From Heart to Hand broadens the reach of the ICA/Boston’s collection in several important ways: it adds to the growing numbers of sculptures produced by women, the cadre of works in dialogue with feminism and the female body, and, most specifically, to the genre of psychologically charged objects such as those by Louise Bourgeois, Tara Donovan, and Mona Hatoum.

2014.46

Kiki Smith positions the body as a site where history, identity, psychology, politics, and experience coalesce. Her visceral oeuvre, manifested in a variety of organic materials and techniques, often creates a dialogue between animal forms and the disturbing aspects of human experience. Life-size figurative sculptures, frequently cast from live models, draw attention to human mortality by way of the systems (reproductive, excretory, vascular) responsible for sustaining life. Smith’s practice is informed by the bodily politics associated with the AIDS epidemic, yet her work is also closely associated with feminist identity politics, a connection that is often made due to her frequent use of the female form and reproductive system.  

​Smith’s Untitled (Breast Jar) traffics in the psychologically charged potential of the uncanny. The beaker-like jar recalls both scientific and medical inquiry, sterility, and experimentation. However, the presence of the contour of a breast in the bottom of the blown-glass jar introduces an association with female sexuality and challenges the hard and clinical nature of the device. The breast juts into the negative space of the volume from which water is poured when the sculpture is displayed. Smith often draws attention to the liquids associated with bodily functions. In the case of the Untitled (Breast Jar), she inverts the relationship of interior and exterior, submerging in liquid an empty breast, itself usually the generator and dispenser of liquid. 

​The addition of Untitled (Breast Jar) broadens the ICA/Boston’s growing collection of sculptures that are produced by women, that are in dialogue with feminism and the female body, and that represent, more specifically, the genre of psychologically charged, seemingly ready-made objects, such as the work of Louise Bourgeois, Tara Donovan, and Mona Hatoum.  

2014.47

Tara Donovan often constructs her installations and sculptures by transforming large quantities of mass-produced items—such as drinking straws, straight pins, wooden toothpicks, and plastic buttons—into stunning works of phenomenal impact. She frequently uses the inherent characteristics of the materials to develop her deeply intricate works.

Nebulous appears almost like a mist concentrated over the floor; its uneven shape suggests either a blown-up view of microscopic mold or a scaled-down model of the Milky Way. The work’s title hints at the uncertain perceptual experience that is created with nothing but “invisible” and “magic” Scotch tape. Donovan loops thousands of frosted strips into an irregular airy weave, saying, “Like fog, it becomes so soft. It looks like it grew out of the floor.” The groundbreaking installation signals Donovan’s exploration of the fugitive effects of light-reactive materials on architectural spaces. It has been singled out by the artist as her favorite piece for its successful visual transformation of the ordinary into the sublime.

In 2008, the ICA/Boston organized a survey of Donovan’s work. In addition to Nebulous, the collection includes her mesmerizing cube sculpture Untitled (Pins), 2003, and her rhythmically abstract print Untitled (Rubber Bands), 2006. Not only does Nebulous join these important works, but it also significantly complements the holdings of major sculptures by generations of women artists, including Louise Bourgeois and Cornelia Parker.

2008.4