Mona Hatoum
Mona Hatoum | Lebanon/England b.1952 | Measures of distance 1988 | Videotape transferred to digital video: colour, stereo, 16 minutes, Lebanon/England, Arabic and English | Purchased 1996 with a special allocation from the Queensland Government. Celebrating the Queensland Art Gallery's Centenary 1895-1995 | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | © The artist
The Hand, the Eye & the Heart | 1 October 2011 — 12 February 2012 | GOMA | Free admission
Mona Hatoum’s work is concerned with the separation from her Palestinian family and, in turn, the very personal consequences of her family’s estrangement from a supportive national culture through the brutalities of war. In 1975, when Hatoum was on a short trip to London, war broke out in Lebanon and she found she was unable to return home. In Measures of distance, she considers this emotional fracture and, in particular, her relationship with her mother. A measure of her own exile and estrangement, as well as other forms of ‘proximity’ and ‘distance’, the video also acts as a portrait of her mother, challenging the stereotype of Islamic mothers as non-sexual beings.
