“Quarters” further hits home the feeling of trapped isolation with its multiple floor to ceiling bunk beds. No comfy mattresses only cold hard steel and the dread of being confined so terribly. This work based on the “Panopticon” a prison model of optimal surveillance. In our current culture this couldn’t be more relevant, with us carrying around our own Panopticons in our pockets. “Misbah” was unsettlingly familiar and that’s what bothered me, the spinning lantern projecting pictures of soldiers and explosions. I stood in the room watching and wondered how desensitized I was thanks to mass media. What are spinning lights when on any news channel you can see all the war and death you can handle? As you walk towards the end of the exhibition you hear a loud buzzing of arcing electrical current. Curiosity draws you forward as some part of you says turn back. “Homebound”, a room filled with buzzing sounds and flickering lights. In the room dozens of household kitchen utensils and furniture coursing with electric thanks to being wired together, here the familiar domestic scene is turned hazardous, lethal even. This is an installation that echoes feminist themes of the kitchen and how such spaces can be prisons. For me, some of my unease would be memories of my kitchen on fire because of a faulty breaker box. The exhibition as a whole is a fragmented narrative of the artist. Fragments of where she is from sit next to fragments of how she was influenced by surrealism and minimalism. Fragments of the home space turned war zone and the familiar unsettling. This is art that has to be experienced to truly see it. If you couldn’t’ tell by my review I thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition and recommend it to any and all. #art #artist #monahatoum #stlouis #pulitzerartsfoundation (at Pulitzer Arts Foundation)
