What words should we use about experiences that are very physical, very material? Experiences which affect us in ambiguous ways, powerfully, before words can order and contain them? we have to use words but hope they will take us back to that materiality and that ambiguity which were basically questions, potentialities, with any number of dimensions and answers. we hope the words we use will link it to the issues which matter, but will also continue to convey that we cannot really say what it means.

In Hatoum's deceptively simple works, defiance cannot easily be separeted from vulerability, order from chaos, beauty from revulsion, the brain from the body, the self from the other, affirmation from negation, form from content, light from dark.

THE METAPHOR OF PLACE

One way of formatting this rich field, one way of tracking a relationship between art work and reality, would be through the mataphor of 'place'.

Placement vs displacement

1. displacement from native nation(country)

2. artwork and the place which it exhibites
-broadening of the conept of art in the 20th century, and the proliferation of new genres, artist have been trying to escape the embalming process in oder to regain a life context. Art has been displaced from the gallery and museum to the street(or other everyday medium of circulation).
But the gallery is not purely artificial because it is the beggining with its architecture.
And also the street is not only real but also fictional.
In the face of these complexities, the most interesting artistic responses have been fluid and non-fornulatic, practising what Brasilian artist Helio Oiticica liked to call ' a critical ambivalence.'

By 1989, with a work like "the light at the end", she had developed her strategy and was deliberately using the reality of the clam, clean art space as a given from which to induce a physiological change in the immediate experience of the spectator. In other words, rather than referring to another reality somewhere else, the work grasped reality 'here and now', thereby allowing the spectator to become conscious, more internal way, of the experience of others.

3. conceptual displacements between the space set aside for art and the space of everyday fulx, and between artist and spectator, always take place in specific circumstances. -> move to place and make artwork to adjust to the each situation.




-Mona Hatoum , phaidon, 1997, p. 34