Mona Hatoum’s art reflects on world conflicts, migrations, and surveillance, using materials as varied as steel, brick, concrete, and human hair, in order to create spaces of tension, paradox, and ambiguity. The motif of the grid and the sphere serve as metaphors for confinement, oppression, and destruction.
The artist articulates these issues through the use of abstraction and poetic Realism which enables her to reach a certain universality and become one of the most influential figures of her generation, as well as a role model for many contemporary artists.
From the point of creation to the placement of the work in the space, Mona Hatoum focuses her attention on the viewer’s body and on the precise moment when he or she encounters the work. Mingling the theme of everyday life with that of global instability, the artist creates a feeling of discomfort. Due to the familiarity of the forms and the poetics of the materials, Mona Hatoum’s works are attractive and irrepressibly lure the eye. Our attention is however disrupted when we approach the work as it reveals harsher and more precarious characteristics than is expected. Consider Remains (chair) V, a piece of furniture reduced to its ghostly charred remains, held together by wire mesh. This chair, a shadow of its former self, no longer suggests a refuge or comforting interior, but points to an alarming and disturbing situation.
The American Museum of Natural History corrects a Native American story in full view of visitors, inviting them to “reconsider this scene.”
This diorama at the American Museum of Natural History was amended in a way that allows museumgoers to see the historical inaccuracies it perpetuates.Credit Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
On the first floor of the American Museum of Natural History, a diorama depicts an imagined 17th-century meeting between Dutch settlers and the Lenape, an Indigenous tribe inhabiting New Amsterdam, now New York City. It was intended to show a diplomatic negotiation between the two groups, but the portrayal tells a different story.
The scene takes place in what is now known as the Battery, with ships on the horizon. The tribesmen wear loincloths, and their heads are adorned with feathers. A few Lenape women can be seen in the background, undressed to the waist, in skirts that fall to midcalf. They keep their heads down, dutiful. In front of a windmill are two fully clothed Dutchmen, one of them resting a firearm on his shoulder. The other, Peter Stuyvesant, colonial governor of New Netherland, is graciously extending his hand, waiting to receive offerings brought by the Lenape.
Critics have said the diorama depicts cultural hierarchy, not a cultural exchange. Museum officials said they had been aware of these implications for a while, and now they have addressed them.
The narrative, created in 1939, is filled with historical inaccuracies and clichés of Native representation, said Bradley Pecore, a visual historian of Menominee and Stockbridge Munsee descent. “These stereotypes are problematic, and they’re still very powerful. They shape the American public’s understanding of Indigenous people.”
About a year ago, the museum asked Mr. Pecore to help solve the diorama problem. Should it be removed entirely? Could the protective glass be temporarily taken out, and what was behind it altered?
Lauri Halderman, the museum’s vice president for exhibition, said, “We could have just covered it over.” Instead, museum officials decided on a more transparent approach. “What was actually more interesting was not to make it go away,” Ms. Halderman continued, “but to acknowledge that it was problematic.”
The solution offers a lesson in the changing nature of history itself. And it’s written on the glass.
Wake: Flight of Birds and People takes as its starting point plants and seeds in the United Arab Emirates, and connects those botanical histories to the movement of people, animals, birds, wind, trade, war and meetings. The installation consisted of writing, archival and new photographs, and drawings placed on discarded wood panels used on construction sites. These were exhibited alongside a small indoor garden made out of non-native plants that are mostly considered native to the UAE. Those plants are in conversation with the stories and histories weaving different narratives and revealing buried histories.
The Seed Catcher is a living sculpture. The work is based on a natural occurrence that Alves noticed during her research visit at the Mina Rashed port in Dubai. While the land in Dubai is constantly being tossed and turned for construction there is a lack of potential for seeds to settle in it and grow. The Seed Catcher is made out of rubble from a construction site forming two small mounds that give shade for plants to grow in, and allow for water to accumulate, a paradoxical structure, where the same element that blocks the seeds’ growth provides its shelter.
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