Mona Hatoum
The Menil Collection
Menil Collection | 1533 Sul Ross Street
October 13, 2017 – February 25, 2018
https://www.artforum.com/events/mona-hatoum-13-238223/
In Homebound, 2000, an entire room is caged off by wires, installed with institutional furniture (chairs, table, crib, bed) linked by cables powering bare bulbs and crackling with electricity. A haunting piece sits in a corner: The tilted frame of a steel wheelchair is spiked at the handles, endangering would-be patients and caretakers alike (Untitled (wheelchair II), 1999). In Hatoum’s world, threats are everywhere, and even the home is terra infirma.
Thinking:
Chaotic wires, furniture, unsettling crackling sounds, and intermittent buzzing noises permeate the gallery, seemingly present everywhere. They evoke a sense of unease while simultaneously creating a feeling of contradiction.
Chiharu Shiota
Berlin-based international artist Shiota Chiharu is known for performances and installations that express the intangible: memories, anxiety, dreams, silence and more. Often arising out of personal experience, her works have enthralled people all over the world and from all walks of life by questioning universal concepts such as identity, boundaries, and existence. Particularly well-known is her series of powerful installations consisting of threads primarily in red and black strung across entire spaces.
Thinking:
In 2019, I saw her exhibition in Japan, and it left a profound impression on me. The densely packed threads created a sense of oppression and fear for the audience.
The Story of Cold Dark Matter
Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View is the restored contents of a garden shed exploded by the British Army at the request of the artist Cornelia Parker. The surviving pieces have been used by Parker to create an installation suspended from the ceiling as if held mid-explosion. Lit by a single lightbulb the fragments cast dramatic shadows on the gallery’s walls.
What do I learn from:
“Something that happened in a split second but that could also be made to have a durational aspect to it.”
Zimoun’s sound installations
His works reference the technology around us and deal with the creation of rhythms through industrial raw materiality and micro-mechanisms arranged with surgical precision. Fascinated by themes of immediacy and structural simplicity, the Bern-based artist is interested in repetitive and reductive principles and in the intricate properties of sound, motion, and space. He uses movement and the unique acoustic of the exhibition space to create site-specific works, which bring visual, sonic, and spatial elements into one immersive experience.
Zimoun’s sculptures and installations incorporate simple mechanical devices such as vibration motors, industrial flotsam-like speaker arrays, PVC hoses, metal wire, polymeric, steel, but also objects such as ventilators, pendulums, cardboard boxes, and sticks. Installed in large quantities and used in repetition, the materials examine the generation and degeneration of patterns, resulting in intricate systems and units organized by very rigid exposition rules.
What do I learn from:
His work frequently appears as examples in sound art installations. I admire the order, simplicity, and mechanized design of his pieces. An interesting aspect of his creations is his consistent use of repetition as a form of artistic expression. By combining the noise of electric motors with the surrounding environment, he creates a sense of oppression. I feel that his work not only conveys the pressure brought by a mechanized society but also seems to challenge the boundary-like divide between art and commodities.