Consider the map: an object created to represent some aspect of the physical world, purporting to be objective but naturally reflecting the perspective of the mapmaker. If you concede that all art is basically impressions upon media, the map is, of all genres, the most totalizing in its pretensions.
It seems appropriate, then, that “the map” is one of several strong motifs in Witness, an exhibition of new and recent work by UK-based Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, nowadays on display at the Beirut Art Center (BAC).
This show is suffused with political content, none of it partisan or evocative of Palestine in any parochial sense, but the most impressive thing about these works, many of which emerged from the artist’s recent three-month residency at the BAC, is the sheer profusion of media she deploys.
Witness features many sturdy metal works—in iron, bronze, brass and stainless steel—and others contrived from more fragile media—glass, tissue paper and the artist’s hair.
The most monumental of the map works in Witness is “Tectonic” (2010). Literally a map of glass, it is comprised of an array of 16 square, reflective panels measuring 3.5 x 510 x 510 centimeters.
Insofar as its continents do not necessarily match those found in a standard store-bought atlas, “Tectonic” evokes a post-colonial critique of the exercise of map-drawing. Reflecting the geo-political bias of the times, 20th-century world maps tended to misrepresent Europe and North America as physically larger than the southern continents.
Hatoum’s continents have been flattened to obliterate the notion of geo-political centrality and scale. South America is far larger than North America and Africa vies with Eurasia (let alone Europe) in size.
The medium demands attention as much as the represented image. The map’s panels are heavy blocks of glass, so both apparent robustness and fragility are integral to the work. In the way of maps, the panels sub-divide geography equally and symmetrically, and so are quite at odds with the contiguity of the landmasses themselves. Reflecting the gallery’s artificial lighting, the glass reminds the viewer that, unlike other maps, this one doesn’t claim to be the real world.
The glass map is reiterated in more intimate (indeed somewhat anachronistic) terms with “Blançoires” (2010). This piece returns to one of Hatoum’s oft-revisited motifs: a pair of impractically hung children’s swings.
The glass seats (40 x 65 x 355 cms each) are suspended from stainless steel chains, again evoking illusory “sturdiness.” Upon one seat is engraved a map of (“Christian”) eastern Beirut while the (“Muslim”) western half of the city is rendered upon the other. The swings are hung in a way that, if either one moves in the manner that is its wont, it will collide with the other, suggesting the two halves of the city are fixed in division and stasis.
The map motif is also evident in some of the exhibition’s older work. 3-D cities (2008), for instance, is comprised of printed maps of Kabul, Baghdad and Beirut set upon a wooden base. Using a cutting tool (several of Hatoum’s works use a child’s paper-doll technique to form images in various media) the artist has alternatively elevated neighborhoods into convex domes or depressed other areas into concave craters.
Apparently this additional dimension intends to represent how certain neighborhoods have undergone development while others have been depleted by violence. If that was the artist’s intent, these maps are (like those in "Blançoires") very much snapshots of their time. In the two years since the Beirut map was devised, for instance, at least one of the “depressed” neighborhoods has since begun to experience its own real estate boom.
Perhaps the most intriguing of Hatoum’s map-works is “Interior / Exterior Landscape” (2010), a mixed-media installation that mimics a bedroom—the room’s arrangement being a projection of its tenant’s mental landscape.
Upon entering the room, the viewer finds a rack of wall-hung coat pegs. Dangling from one peg is a shopping bag, cleverly devised from a world map that’s been segmented with scissors.
On the next two pegs, a pair of rounded coat hangers hang alongside one another, creating the effect of partially overlapping circles. Upon the portion of wall that these hangers frame, Hatoum has pencil-sketched an outline of the eastern and western hemispheres—reproducing yet another style of world map.
The map motif is variously reiterated in the installation’s other objects as well. On the floor adjacent the coat pegs sits a metal stool. Weathered, corroded by wear and tear, drizzled with drops of paint, the seat too resembles a map—the continents comprised of a stratigraphy of spilt paint, original coloring and, at bottom, corroded metal.
Against the next wall is a worn antique desk with a chair-back rising like a mountain range from the midst of the desktop. Cracks and flaws in the wood mark the desk’s landscape, as do residues of paint and coffee cup stains. The partially open drawer is lined with soiled paper, decorated in colorful cartoon images of leaves, flowers and toadstools.
In a canary cage hanging from the next wall sits a small, carefully crafted hairball. Against the same wall is an old-fashioned cot. The pillowcase is adorned with a sewn pattern that could represent continental shorelines. The job was abandoned partway through, and the un-sewn threads emerging from the pillow resemble human hair. The same substance streams from the bedsprings, as though it had been pulled away over the years from a now-absent body, or the metal and the hair were somehow of the same substance.
A map, a piece of paper marking the path from place to place, reverberates with meaning beyond its utility. In practice, it represents how spaces used to look or how, if things go according to plan, they will look. The material restlessness of the map-works in Mona Hatoum’s Witness serves to add an extra dimension to this discussion, reminding spectators that media and representation are inseparable.
Jim Quilty - A Beirut-based Canadian journalist and the editor of the arts and culture desk at The Daily Star, Beirut’s English-language daily. Over the last decade he has written about the politics, arts and cultural production of the Middle East and North Africa.
