Video Series Presents Work by Mona Hatoum

A continuous screening of Measures of Distance, a 15-minute video by performance and installation artist Mona Hatoum, will be presented in the Handwerker Gallery on Thursday, February 22, from 10 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The screening, which is the ninth presentation in the gallery’s Global Video Series, is free and open to the public.

Hatoum, born in Beirut in 1952, was stranded in Europe at the outset of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975. She decided to study art in London, where she has subsequently lived most of her adult life. Like that of many young artists whose work emerged in Great Britain and the United States during the early 1980s, Hatoum’s early development was shaped by the fusion of artistic languages from the previous decade, such as video and performance art, with the rapidly shifting social and cultural milieu in which the artists were immersed.

Measures of Distance, made in 1988, foreshadows Hatoum’s evolution from the more subjective perspective of performance-based work to the sculptures and installations she has produced in the intervening decade. The video’s key footage uses a visual screen of Arabic script—taken from a series of letters Hatoum’s mother sent her from Beirut—that is superimposed over the filmed image of her mother taking a shower during one of Hatoum’s rare visits home. The video’s sound track, which consists of Hatoum’s reading aloud from her mother’s letters, accompanies a visual montage that evokes feelings of isolation and explores personal and family identity against a backdrop of exile and displacement.

The theme of alienation is central to Hatoum’s work and has received eloquent expression in many of her subsequent sculptures and installations. Many of her iron and steel constructions radiate a threatening energy through shadows, heat, and magnetic fields.

Hatoum has been an artist in residency at Western Front in Vancouver and has been featured in many international exhibitions, including solo shows at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and De Appel Centre for Contemporary Art in Amsterdam. Her group exhibitions include V Bienal de la Habana and Contemporary Arab Women Artists at the Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

For more information call the gallery at 274-3018, or contact gallery director Jelena Stojanovic at 274-3548.