Mona Hatoum & 'Messy Identities'

'routes for the rootless' - Antoni, Janine. Interview with Mona Hatoum. BOMB.

Hatoum was born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents exiled from Haifa, Israel. In 1975, she moved to England to escape the war that was beginning in Lebanon. Subsequent to her displacement by conflict, Hatoum has found artistic inspiration in movement, travel, and discovery. Hatoum stated that the ‘nomadic existence suits me fine (…) because I do not expect myself to identify completely with any one place’. It is evident Hatoum finds liberation within being able to move. This freedom is something many people are fighting for currently.

Hatoum has previously stated that it is impossible to differentiate the elements that make up her own self ‘as if I have a recipe and I can actually isolate the Arab ingredient, the woman ingredient, the Palestinian ingredient. People often expect tidy definitions of otherness, as if identity is something fixed and easily definable”. To Hatoum, her identity is a melting pot not to be defined.

Hatoum wishes to create a situation where ‘reality itself becomes a questionable point. Where one has to reassess their assumptions and their relationship to things around them’. This forces the viewer to re-evaluate their perspective on both the importance and unimportance of ‘identity’. Does it define us? Is it even what we thought it was? ‘A kind of self-examination and an examination of the power structures that control us: Am I the jailed or the jailer? The oppressed or the oppressor? Or both’. Her individual movement is one of self-exploration and the de-bunking of things we have all been spoon-feed to believe.

Mona Hatoum quoted in Beyond East and West: Seven Transnational Artists, by David O’Brien (Urbana-Champaign, Ill.: Krannert Art Museum, 2004), 44

Antoni, Janine. Interview with Mona Hatoum. BOMB.