Cornelia Parker (Born 1956 in Cheshire, UK) is known for her poetic transformation of existing materials, which she achieves through processes that are both physical and conceptual. With an elegant sculptural hand she constructs works that function as richly evocative metaphors.

Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) is an outstanding example of Parker’s suspended sculptures. This major installation piece is constructed from the charred residue of an actual case of suspected arson. Here, Parker uses the materials as found, without transforming their physical nature. Yet in her hands, they constitute a spectacular explosion of form in space as the once-glowing, now-blackened embers are precisely hung to create a forest of charcoal fragments. Parker’s sculpture can be considered formally in relation to the rich tradition of recent British sculpture, by artists ranging from Richard Long to Tony Cragg. It also captures the forensic fascination evident in so much of Parker’s work, evoking through its title the malicious intent of an arsonist, making her sculpture the perfect vehicle for both dazzling visual experience and vivid imaginings.

Cornelia Parker’s major ICA/Boston show in 2000 proved to be a landmark exhibition for both the artist and the institution. Parker’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, it won critical accolades and popular attention in Boston and reached still wider audiences on a national tour. Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) marks this important moment in the ICA’s history.

Since the 1960s, Annette Messager (Born 1943 in Berck, France) has used photography, knitting, drawing, collage/assemblage, and other techniques to engage issues of the body, gender, and identity. With imagery that is poetic, humorous, and morbid, she interrogates assumptions around femininity and exposes the cultural forces that shape our ideas about what it means to be a woman.

​In the series The Story of Dresses, Messager inserts dresses into shallow wooden cases covered with glass. Along with the clothing, she includes such items as small photographs of body parts, painted images, and printed words. Because of the nature of their contents, the cases conjure coffins—they seem to allude to the body and life of a woman who is no longer present. The work’s title suggests that the real story does not concern the person herself but rather the objects and images that surround her.

As part of her work, Messager has created a number of roles for herself, including those of “the trickster,” “the practical woman,” and “the peddler.” Like the personas she assumes, the dresses and images in the cases suggest that identity is something unfixed, that it can be “worn” like an item of clothing. The objects also evoke relics and votive images (images of saints or body parts given to churches during the Middle Ages), in line with Messager’s frequent invocation of religious imagery. During her childhood, her father exposed her to the stained glass windows and altarpieces of medieval churches, and she often draws on these aesthetic experiences in her work.

​Messager has become a key figure in postwar art, and The Story of Dresses augments the ICA/Boston’s collection of works by important female artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Working in sculpture, drawing, photography, and site-specific installation, Roni Horn (Born 1955 in New York) explores the very nature of art, especially as it relates to site, environment, and identity. In an interview on Art21, Horn describes the importance of words to her process: “I move through language to arrive at the visual.” From this conceptual basis, she crafts objects and arrangements that often implicate the viewer, either through spatial structures or direct address. Frequently aligned with the aesthetics of minimalism, Horn uses repetition and doubling to invite viewers to look closely and to discover the subtle differences that constitute the world. Through her artistic practice, she seeks to activate the space between the perceptible and imperceptible. Since the 1980s, she has frequently visited Iceland, finding inspiration in its remarkable landscape and relative isolation.

Key and Cue, No. 288 forms part of a body of text-based sculpture that Horn began in the 1990s. In this work, an aluminum bar propped against the wall draws attention to the supports of both floor and wall. Having more than one face, the sculpture refuses to be seen or known all at once. From one vantage point, an abstract pattern of black lines resembles a barcode. From another, these embedded plastic bands cohere into a line of text, an extract from poem 288 by Emily Dickinson, whose writing has had a strong influence on Horn. As the viewer shifts from seeing to reading, the line of text, a statement and question—“I’m Nobody! Who Are You?”—moves the viewer beyond the physical object into a space of introspection.

Jenny Holzer’s (Born 1950 in Gallipolis, OH) medium is words and ideas, and she uses a variety of vehicles—from stickers, posters, and T-shirts to benches, bronze plaques, electronic displays, and the Internet—to disseminate her piercingly incisive phrases in public spaces. Holzer incorporates strategies from mass media and advertising to interrogate the effects of rhetoric. Rooted in conceptual art, semiotics, and feminism, her text-based works engage spectators in fundamental questions: Who is speaking? Where does this text come from? What does it mean? Answers, however, remain productively elusive. Her texts—whether directives, confessions, or observations—tend to elide authorship, unlocking a sort of societal subconscious from which hacked-up bits of ideology, desire, fear, humor, and hatred pour forth. Like many other artists who came of age in the 1980s, Holzer addresses such issues as violence, war, sex, power, and money, harnessing the power of text and public space to do so.

​Reminiscent of memorial benches found in public parks, this small marble sculpture has been etched with the phrase “HANDS ON YOUR BREAST CAN KEEP YOUR HEART BEATING,” taken from Holzer’s the Survival Series (1983–85). The marble bench—a form typically associated with classical statuary, gravestones, and tombs—lends a weighty permanence to its epitaph-like inscription. Enigmatic, the phrase suggests both a sexual advance and a patriotic gesture. Like much of Holzer’s work, the sculpture raises questions about the many forms of desire and how they might intersect with nationalism, sex, and consumerism.

By combining disparate elements—some readymade and some crafted—Rachel Harrison (Born 1966 in New York) challenges viewers to explore layers of metaphor, allusion, and double-entendre. Since the early 1990s, she has been recognized for the wry humor she brings to political satire. As grotesque as they are humorous, Harrison’s sculptures evince her consideration of the global traffic of pop-culture images as well as their correspondence with art history. Her work is often considered alongside other contemporary assemblage sculptors such as Isa Genzken, Paul McCarthy, and Franz West.

Jack Lemmon shares the same name as the comic actor, who was commonly referred to as “Dickhead” by his co-star in the film version of The Odd Couple. The sculpture also prominently features a rubber mask of Dick Cheney—a figure many hold responsible for the controversial political policies of the last decade—as one side of the mannequin’s head. Whether sociopolitical satire or sheer folly, the sculpture is purposefully playful and ambiguous, inviting viewers to build narratives by interpreting complementary elements. As Harrison argues in a 2008 interview in Bomb, “Artworks need to unfold slowly over time in real space to contest the instantaneous distribution and circulation of images with which we’ve become so familiar.”

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.

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.