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.

In performances, sculptures, installations, and photographs, Mona Hatoum (Born 1952 in Beirut) 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.

Kiki Smith (Born 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany) 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.

Kiki Smith (Born 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany) 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.

Tara Donovan (Born 1969 in New York) 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.

Through her sculptural work, Taylor Davis (Born 1959 in Palm Springs, CA) explores the relationship between object and viewer through precise manipulations of form. Her work, often made of wood and industrial materials, investigates issues of orientation, space, identity, and perception. Taylor Davis is a long-time and critically acclaimed member of the Boston arts community and has taught at Massachusetts College of Art and Design since 1999.

In Untitled, Davis draws inspiration from vernacular objects and architecture. The work evokes such structures as a wooden pallet turned on its end, a garden gate, or a pen for livestock. Seen from a distance these associations compete with the sculpture’s abstract grid of horizontals and verticals, which oscillate in an optical play of positive and negative space. From a closer vantage the spare pine boards come alive with detail. The setting of screws marks a steady cadence while the wood grain swirls. The interior of the work contains a secret: mirrors line its frame on all four sides, opening up an internal landscape of seemingly infinite reflection, a field that appears to extend forever.

Louise Bourgeois (Born 1911 in Paris; died 2010 in New York) has been creating poignant, cathartic work for more than seventy years, exploring sexuality, the human form, and traumatic events from her childhood. Janus is an evocatively corporeal object, formed out of sleekly polished, milky-hued porcelain. Bourgeois is well known for sculptural work in a variety of media, including marble, bronze, plaster, and fabric, but ceramic is a rarity in her oeuvre. After a period in the late 1950s when Bourgeois withdrew from the art world, in the 1960s she began experimenting with organic and biomorphic forms. She created six versions of Janus in 1968: five in bronze and one in porcelain. Each piece in this series is delicately suspended by a single wire, free to spin on its axis. Other hanging sculptures from this era include the amorphous painted bronze Fée Couturière, 1963, and the phallic latex-and-plaster sculpture Fillette, 1968, with which Bourgeois famously posed for her portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1982. The title references the Roman god Janus, the god of gates, doorways, and beginnings and endings, who is often portrayed as having two heads facing in opposite directions. Indeed, the month of January, the beginning of each year, is named after this god. There is a sense of fragility and purity in Janus, with its smooth, clean form rendered in porcelain, in comparison to its companion pieces cast in the more fleshy bronze. A duality of meaning can often be found in Bourgeois’s work, with forms appearing at once male and female, abstract and representational, menacing and nurturing. In Janus, we see mirrored forms drooping in opposite directions from a central point, a blending of female and male anatomy that creates a disarming sculpture.

At age eight, Kerry James Marshall (Born 1955 in Birmingham, AL) moved with his family from Birmingham to the neighborhood of Watts in South Central Los Angeles. The environment of his upbringing had a profound impact on the subject matter of his work, which revisits the legacy of the Civil Rights era and the nation’s progress—or lack of progress—toward the goal of racial equality. As Marshall has stated: “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go.”

The five dinner plates in this set feature the texts “We Shall Overcome,” “Burn Baby Burn,” “By Any Means Necessary,” “Black Is Beautiful,” and “Black Power,” taken from a print series shown in Mementos, a 1998 solo exhibition of Marshall’s work organized by the Renaissance Society in Chicago, which traveled to the ICA/Boston, among other venues. The ceramic plates were produced as an edition to benefit the Renaissance Society. The affirmations they present are slogans popular during the 1960s Civil Rights movement, and they range in tone from peaceful to aggressive, reflecting the plurality of stances taken in the fight for equality in that era. In discussing the prints in his essay for the Mementos exhibition brochure, curator Hamza Walker considers them elegiacally, as “fallen monuments, tombstones even, to popular slogans which have lost their ability to galvanize the black community.” On benign, domestic plates, their revolutionary impact is perhaps further softened.

Though Glenn Ligon (Born 1960 in New York) began his career as an abstract painter, after enrolling in the Whitney Independent Study Program in the mid-1980s he turned to more conceptual concerns. He is now known for using text and found images to introduce a broad range of references in his work.

Rückenfigur is an important neon piece that was included in the 2011 exhibition Glenn Ligon: America at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It consists of a neon sign, painted black. The title, literally “back figure,” is a German art-historical term for the Romantic device of depicting a subject from behind, often contemplating a grand landscape, as in the work of Caspar David Friedrich. Facing the same direction, the viewer can more readily identify with the subject’s experience. Ligon literalizes the title by placing the ostensible “front” of the neon sign against the floor, placing the viewer in the symbolic position of looking at the back of the vast and diverse landscape that is America.