Mona Hatoum’s world is filled with cages and concrete, charred homes and inescapable prisons. It’s not just her world that’s like that, obviously, it’s all of ours. Because written through the Palestinian artist’s work is all the conflict, oppression, violence and degradation that’s so rife in modern society.
Chunks of rebar concrete hang from steel poles in a perfect minimalist grid as you walk in. It’s a huge, crumbling cage. A neat, square pile of brick lies on a trolley nearby, chipped away at but resolutely immovable.
Grids appear throughout the show as knowing references to art history and minimalism’s place in it. A fine mesh curtain echoes the interlocking strands of a steel fence, but look close and you see it’s made of human hair. It’s unbearably fragile and physical, but still a form of containment.
Hair and nails are everywhere, arranged into patterns, knitted together, the final remnants of a body that once occupied Hatoum’s oppressive spaces.
And oppressive is the word. A room of abandoned steel bunk beds carries endless allusions to prison camps and forced detainment, but still mimics the shapes and composition of modern art. It’s horrifying in its mixture of historical brutality and aesthetic nous. The charred living room in the next room is even worse: so fragile, so scary, so obvious in what it forces your brain to consider.
The works with globes here are less good, especially the chintzy glass mobile in the first room. But damn, when Hatoum combines idea and aesthetic into these terrifying little art bombs, we all get caught in the blast. This is art at its most political, and its most effective.
