online: 1 april 2011 modified: 5, 10 march, 1 april 2011 1 march 2011 views of the city
at the White Cube Gallery, Central London
...artworks by Mona Hatoum...
...writing this in a windowless room containing stacks (or towers) of raw steel boxes cut-into by welding torches as if by bullets or by explosives... no place here for people except as malign influence... yet so carefully selected and arranged as to comprise a profound criticism of city as it is, the inhumanity of urban structure, the repetition, the emptiness, and yet the absent spirit, of life as we know it.. (artificial or natural)...
...sitting now on the stairs leading down into the basement... and looking at a gentler work... again of urbanity criticised... street maps of Beirut, Kabul and Baghdad, on wooden boards, with regular bowl-shaped or dome-shaped intrusions into or onto the maps... lumps and hollows (composed of delicate geometric cuttings into the map surfaces) that faintly resemble bomb craters or ziggurats...
...how and why does she do it, these negative yet invigorating artworks... always different... always new thinking... yet in an abstract way poetic...
...do they come to her in dreams (as well as in observation) of the inhuman realities we inhabit and accept...
...not much information is given... apart from the uncompromising artworks themselves...
...these fragments of troubled cities empty of people... except that they are constructed by ourselves... as is this exhibition... a metaphorical white cube... a part of our world as it's made...
...back at ground level i don't know what to think of a roomful of dark red swings hanging from chains... each inscribed with the street plan of a different city... no longer critical (it seems to me) but more playfully suggesting that this serious life as we live it is perhaps without purpose... though chained?
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