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Sunday 12PM to 5PM
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PAST EXHIBITION
Present Tense: Mona Hatoum
June 13, 2008—August 9, 2008
Press Release
Press enquiries: Catherine Mason at Calum Sutton PR on +44 (0)20 7340 1416 or catherine@suttonpr.com
Company registration: 05299582 / Registered charity number: 1107425
Parasol unit
foundation for contemporary art 14 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW / T +44 207 490 7373 / F + 44 207 490 7775
www.parasol-unit.org / info@parasol-unit.org
Press release
Present Tense: Mona Hatoum
13 June – 8 August 2008, preview 12 June, 6 – 8 pm
This June, Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art will present an exhibition of important
works by the British Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum. The exhibition will present works as yet
unseen in London that cover more than a decade of Hatoum’s career. Including large-scale
installations, sculpture and works on paper, this exhibition will illustrate the scope of Hatoum’s
varied artistic practice that, through residencies and travels, draws its influence and materials
from very different cultures and locales. The works in this show were made in places as diverse
as Cairo, Stockholm, Jerusalem, rural France and a shaker community in North America.
In the course of her international career Hatoum has created work in a variety of media,
including performance, sculpture, video, installation and photography. Her work is rooted in
notions of displacement, uncertainty and power structures, subjects that are addressed through
the use of familiar, everyday domestic objects transformed into foreign, uncanny things. Hatoum’s
practice also deals with issues related to the making of art and, in particular, with questions
about the inherent physicality of sculpture as well as our relationship to the formal concerns of
space and material.
The works on show at Parasol unit will include Mobile Home II, 2006, an installation of furniture and
household possessions that continually shift along horizontal wires strung between two metal street
barriers. In perpetual, barely perceptible animation, the work could be a metaphor for a population
in constant flux and movement resulting in a world where national and social identities are never
fixed. References to unrest and violence will also be evident in the installations Horizon, 1998–99
and Misbah, 2006-07 and Round and Round, 2007, all of which play with the forms of toy soldiers
with guns poised for action. In Undercurrent, 2004, cloth-covered electrical cables are woven into a
two-metre-square carpet fringed with light-bulbs which illuminate and fade with a mesmerising
melancholic pulse, hinting at an ever-present threat to stability. Notions of violence will similarly be
referenced through a new sculpture, Nature morte aux grenades, 2008, a collection of colourful
crystal shapes resembling hand grenades, placed on a steel trolley. The contrast between the bright,
confectionary-like colours of the shapes and the subtext of danger highlights the duality of Hatoum’s
approach, blurring the distinction between subject and context in a disturbing manner.
Another work on show will be Present Tense, produced during a residency in Jerusalem in 1996. A
floor piece, Present Tense is made out of blocks of local olive oil soap with red glass beads
imbedded into its surface, delineating the outline of the map of the Oslo Agreement between Israel
and the Palestinian Authorities. Since making this work, Hatoum has frequently used the map as a
motif in her work, most recently through a process of material-removal. In both Projection (cotton),
2006 and Baluchi (blue), 2008 the ground appears to have been eroded or dissolved away, leaving a
negative space in the form of the ‘Peters Projection’ world map, an image that depicts an accurate
Continued…/
Press enquiries: Catherine Mason at Calum Sutton PR on +44 (0)20 7340 1416 or catherine@suttonpr.com
Company registration: 05299582 / Registered charity number: 1107425
distribution of land mass in its true proportions, as opposed to the more common maps drawn from
a Western-centric perspective.
Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1952. She came to the UK in 1975, where she remained
following the outbreak of civil war in her homeland, studying at Byam Shaw School of Art and Slade
School of Art, and now divides her time between London and Berlin. Hatoum’s career has seen solo
exhibitions at museums worldwide including Centre Pompidou, Paris (1994); Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago (1997), which toured to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York;
Museum of Modern Art, Oxford and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Castello di
Rivoli, Turin (1999); Tate Britain, London (2000); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Magasin
3 Stockholm Konsthall (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2005); and group exhibitions
such as The Turner Prize (1995); Documenta 11, Kassel (2002); Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005) and
The Biennale of Sydney (2006). Her work is held in collections across the world including Tate,
London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; British Council, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and
Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art. Hatoum was nominated for the Turner Prize in
1995. In 2004 she was awarded the Roswitha Haftmann Stiftung Prize (Zurich) and became the first
visual arts recipient of the prestigious Sonning Prize (Copenhagen).
Visitor information
Gallery opening times: Tuesday – Saturday, 10am – 6pm and Sunday, 12 – 5pm
Admission: Free
From Angel tube, turn left out of the station and onto City Road. Continue down City Road for ten
minutes and turn left onto Wharf Road before the Texaco Service station.
From Old Street Tube, leave the station from exit 1 and walk up City Road for five minutes. Turn
right onto Wharf Road after the Texaco service Station.
Buses 43, 205 and 214 all travel down City Road.
Notes to editors
Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art is an independent educational charity devoted to
promoting contemporary art for the benefit of the public. The core activity of the foundation is to
showcase the work of the contemporary leading and young international artists in various media.
Each year Parasol unit mounts three to four exhibitions in various media, and each is usually
accompanied by a publication. In order to encourage the widest possible access to its exhibition
programme, Parasol unit does not charge admission fees.
2008/09 Programme
Charles Avery
10 September – 8 November 2008 (preview 9 September)
YZ Kami
21 November 2008 – 14 February 2009 |
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