Agostino Osio/Courtesy Fondazione Querini Stamplia, Venice

Mona Hatoum, "Hot Spot III" (2009). Stainless steel, neon tube, 92¼ x 87¾ x 87¾ in.

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Mona Hatoum’s exhibition "Interior Landscape" opened in two floors of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia during the Venice Biennale, and indeed the artist’s career-spanning, gender- and identity-informed interventions are geared toward this city, whose preserved cultural history overlaps with an international contemporary tradition. The 16th-century palazzo, now a museum (curator Chiara Bertola organized the exhibition), retains period decor, with libraries, stuccoed enfilades, and busts by the late-Baroque sculptor Orazio Marinali. Hatoum turned this decorative environment into a game of catch-me-if-you-can.

In many of the existing vitrines, Hatoum used strategies of removal and substitution to suggest alternative ways of seeing. T42 Gold (2009) is a modern Siamese teacup placed among a delicate ceramics set; it’s the most difficult object to identify as an art object in the exhibition, and once you find it, you recognize the vanity of posing a real historical rupture between Hatoum’s present and the past preserved in the site. A spiked steel colander titled No Way III (1996) inverts the instrument’s porous functionality into something forbidding.

Hot Spot III (2009) is an oversize globe — in Hatoum’s hands, that means a steel cage with the landmasses outlined in neon. If the map is the Renaissance luxury object turned mass-market souvenir par excellence, and a device that has structured both the nation-state and the Orient-Occident binary, Hatoum pictures the world in all its cosmopolitan commercialism. The red neon light buzzes and flickers wildly, its delicate demarcations absorbing and threatening the quiet of the museum’s domestic space.

"Mona Hatoum" originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2009 Table of Contents.