Measures of distance

Mona Hatoum, a Lebanese artist of Palestinian origin with homes in London and Berlin, has an international reputation and, in addition to participating in numerous collective shows, has had major personal exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and in New York. She was a member of the Arts Council of Great Britain’s Committee for artists’ films and videos from 1990 to 1993 and has been invited to lecture in a number of countries.In 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon while Mona Hatoum was in London. She found herself cut off from Lebanon, a country that she had no desire to leave after her family was forced into exile from Palestine. The pain of displacement and the disorientation that it causes are apparent in her work as a whole yet they also resist the dissolution of the social, sexual and political being in the disorder of the world. Measures of distance appears as the artist’s reply to  a letter from her mother who assesses her absence in a daily life marked by war and the increasingly obvious estrangement from the time before. Video offers a response to this void as a progressive and rebellious movement towards the distant land until the revelation of the primeval, maternal body.