So Much I Want To Say

About the exhibition

Individual. Family. Home. Conflict. Displacement. Dislocation. Alienation. Mona Hatoum’s artistic practice focuses on concepts that are constantly being revised and are always engaging. Employing a concentrated idiom in a career spanning over 40 years, her art has transitioned from performance to large-scale sculpture and installation.

I first met Hatoum on a studio visit during her Swedish Arts Grants Committee IASPIS residency in Stockholm in 2001. We embarked on a conversation about organising a major presentation of her work at Magasin III where I worked at the time. The exhibition was held in 2004 in collaboration with two German museums.

Some of the works included in the exhibition So Much I Want To Say at Accelerator were produced in the early part of Hatoum’s career, in the mid-1980s, and others were conceived in conjunction with the above mentioned exhibition at Magasin III. Thus the works presented in the Accelerator exhibition span these 20 years. During this time, Hatoum’s practice has changed, particularly in relation to the techniques she works with, but is still nevertheless characterised by a consistent, restrained expression and a frequent undertone of conflict or unrest.

Working largely immaterially, with performance and the moving image, Hatoum’s early works were explicitly political and influenced by her life story and dislocated existence. Although the political dimension continues to play a role in her art, the installation and sculptural works have acquired a more ambiguous and indirect strategy where concepts and ideas are articulated through the formal and material reality of her objects and environments.

Undercurrent, 2004

Hatoum has always been interested in invisible forces like the magnetism or electricity that animates all objects. They could be seen as metaphors for hostility, conflict and social unrest, undercurrents that constantly surround us, as individuals and society as a whole. Undercurrents of things that are unexpressed, invisible tensions, conflicts, disagreements and systematic actions were some of the themes that Hatoum wanted to explore and which provided the focus around which the work was centred.

Hatoum arrived in Stockholm in 2003 with a bag full of samples of cloth covered cables. She wanted to work with forms and techniques that brought to mind the idea of home and to utilise the traditional craft of weaving. She had already created a great number of textile artworks and through this process had experimented with weaving electric cables. She carried out extensive research into materials and technical solutions. Further into the production process, we started to talk about the actual form of the piece – a loosely woven square rug measuring 2 x 2 metres woven out of grey, cloth covered electric cables – the type used for domestic appliances such as irons or electric heaters. The rug was woven in Stockholm, using a simple loom – a frame with wooden pegs – around which the cables were attached.

Long fringes of cables, like tentacles, unravel out of the rug’s central woven square, meandering across the floor of the exhibition space, a light bulb attached to their ends. The light bulbs are connected to a dimmer device which fluctuates the intensity of the light, making the bulbs fade in and out, in a slow breath-like pulse.