Mona Hatoum at The New Museum
The oeuvre of Mona Hatoum evokes a landscape peopled by absence. On many levels, the ideas of intimacy and vulnerability inhabit her work. She often uses images representing intimacy, such as a bed, to illustrate this. But the messages of her work are not bound to a single object. They take,the form of whatever material her interests follow. In one installation, Hatoum employs a video of the inner orifices of her body. Her works are visual, tactile, and in the words of one critic, corporeal. For what Hatoum's work lacks in an actual human presence is instead represented through metaphoric objects projecting a gestalt of vulnerability and loss, of intimacy and defensiveness or distance, a foreshortening of the desire to either remain intimate, or to iinitiate the process of trust and risk, by which intimacy develops. In Quarters (1996), a set of four five high metal bunk beds face each other in the shape of a cross. I think that this design is only incidental to the space of the in