Mona Hatoum. Natura Morta (Edwardian Vitrine), 2010; Murano glass and cabinet; 54 ½ x 24 x 11 ¾ in. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin. Photo: Joerg Lohse.

Without a doubt, a gift this generous, focused, and conscious of the gender inequities that plague so many museum collections plants fertile roots for the ICA’s future curatorial innovations and potential loan relationships. Also currently on view is Transcending Material, a selection of the museum’s collection that mixes much of Lee’s recent donation with previously acquired works. It is clear the ICA was nimble in adjusting its programming to showcase these newly expanded offerings. By having all three concurrent solo exhibitions by women (Arlene Schechet in the main gallery; Hatoum and Erin Shirreff in the smaller galleries), the ICA is a stirring inspiration, if only for its outright rarity.

Mona Hatoum was born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents, who had to renew their residency annually.[2] Hatoum’s father worked at the British embassy, which entitled the family to British citizenship. When the artist first visited London in 1975 in her early 20s, civil war broke out in Lebanon and she was unable to return home. It was nearly a decade until she saw her parents again. These early experiences of displacement and familial separation set off a nomadic trajectory for Hatoum, who currently splits her time between London and Berlin while not traveling internationally to a variety of exclusive artist residencies. “I think best on the move,” she has said, feeling both “at home and alien at any place.”[3] This unease with stable definitions of home is a theme running throughout the artist’s practice.

Mona Hatoum. T42, 1993-1998; stoneware; 2 1/4 x 9 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin. Photo: Iain Dickens.

The ICA’s presentation features sculptural pieces that Hatoum has become well known for: exquisitely fabricated objects aimed to play with a viewer’s sense of the uncanny, integrating a kind of visceral violence within domestic symbols. The gallery walls are painted a deep red, uniting the works in a pseudo-interior home space. Rubber Mat (1996) is the scale and size of a typical welcome mat, only made out of transparent silicon forms molded to look like intestines. Dormeuse (1998) is a chaise lounge, in its classically feminine, elegant form, only made from riveted steel. Natura Morta (Edwardian Vitrine) (2010) is a cabinet filled with Murano glass forms that resemble both colored fruits and hand grenades. Performance Still (1985/95) is the only two-dimensional work in the show, a documentation of a performance, which feels somewhat out of place in the room.

Mona Hatoum. Performance Still, 1985/95; gelatin silver print mounted on aluminum; 30 x 42 ½ in. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin. Photo: Stephen White.

All of the sculptural pieces operate successfully, drawing in viewers quickly and imparting some uncomfortable and loaded conceptual reverberations. There is, however, a sense of missed opportunity in the curation to apply new connections to allusions as rich as Hatoum’s. All of the works on display have been previously shown in similar combinations in a variety of fairs and exhibitions, most of which were well documented and contributed to the artist’s high regard. Though Mona Hatoum is absent of creative intervention from the ICA, it is well worth a visit, if only to see the holdings, which will no doubt inform the museum’s future direction.

[1] http://www.artery.wbur.org/2014/12/19/ica-gift-women-artists

[2] www.artnews.com/2015/08/21/making-the-ordinary-anything-but-mona-hatoum-on-her-unnerving-sculptures-in-2005/

[3] www.artnews.com/2015/08/21/making-the-ordinary-anything-but-mona-hatoum-on-her-unnerving-sculptures-in-2005/

Mona Hatoum is on view at the ICA Boston through November 29, 2015.

It is this dichotomy of attraction and fear, comfort and chaos, that drives Mona Hatoum’s work Current Disturbance, installed at the Whitechapel Gallery, as the third of a four part series – ‘an exhibition in 4 acts,’ displaying works from Greek collector Dimitris Daskalopoulos’s private holdings.

Mona Hatoum, Current Disturbance, 1996. Photo: Geoff Craddick/PA/Whitechapel Gallery

Created during Hatoum’s 1996 residency at Capp Street Project in San Francisco, Current Disturbance consists of 240 wire cages, each containing a single light bulb, stacked in a manner that recalls images of chicken farm housing practices. The thick black wires that lead from each lightbulb coil in the centre in an endless and menacing pit contained within the architectural structure of the cages. The entire system has been likened to a Panopticon – however we can only view it from the outside and are not implicated within it’s structures of surveillance and control.

Within the cages, the lights are enticingly warm, emitting a soft yellow glow that draws us in like moths to a flame. Or simply to an electric lightbulb for that matter. The lights pulsate and surge – slowly rising and fading, building to a great intensity then abruptly cutting out to blackness. Taking a moment, they regain their strength and begin to build once again.

Mona Hatoum, Current Disturbance, 1996. Photo: Geoff Craddick/PA/Whitechapel Gallery

There is no real pattern to their undulating, or at least not one we are able to decipher. At times they peak quickly  – others they manage to hold on for quite some time before faltering.

Intensifying their struggle, the fluctuating light is translated into electronic sound – an amplification of the current flowing through the wires that creates a low humming, a rising buzzing, and at the peak, an severe screeching that gets inside your head and leaves your ears ringing when it cuts out and the room turns to black.

Each bulb is contained within an isolated cell, but they function as a coherent, yet chaotic, system. It seems as though there is some sort of purpose for their action, but it is as if they are not able to quite get there. As they rise in intensity they collapse in upon themselves, just short of their goal, and after regaining their strength, try, try again.

They reach for something impossible for them to simultaneously achieve. Their persistence short-circuits the system and they all fail as a result – victims of their collective drive.

In modest materials – wood, wire and lightbulbs – Hatoum has constructed a system of power, pandemonium, aspiration and failure. While initially transfixed by the light, the subsequent experience is painful – we cannot create order out of the turmoil however hard we try.

A system of controlled chaos that will literally leaves your head buzzing for days.