In the latest posts we looked at words that may enrich our personal glossaries, so let's continue the thread via a work of art - "Nature morte aux grenades" (2006-7) by Mona Hatoum - that plays on language.
Born in Beirut to a Palestinian family in 1952 and living and working in London and Berlin, the internationally renowned artist employs a variety of media in her practice, including performance, sculpture, video, installation and photography, quite often creating large-scale installations. In her works the artist often tackles socio-political issues, such as occupation, war, violence, torture, detention, separation, borders, memory and domesticity.
Hatoum often works on notions of displacement, turning familiar objects into something foreign and uncanny, as it happens in "Nature morte aux grenades", a collection of bulb-like glass objects resembling hand grenades in bright candy colours, placed on a steel trolley.
The title of the work is taken from an eponymous 1947 still-life painting by Henri Matisse (View this photo), representing pomegranates and other fruit on a table. In this work Hatoum plays with language and in particular with the homophone "grenade" - French for both "pomegranate" and "grenade bombs". Matisse's original reference to fruit turns into a reference to something ominous, evoking death and the conflicts like the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90), which forced the artist herself into exile. So, while the bright colours of the glass pieces are visually striking, the fact that they look like grenades generates contrasts between desire (in a way the shape of some of these objects also calls to mind lollipops, but sex toys as well) and repulsion, fascination and fear.
There are further contrasts in the piece with the stainless-steel table resembling a surgical or embalming table, hinting at violence and death, while the glass objects in vibrantly vivid shades call to mind toys and the glorification of weapons in popular culture. Weapons become glossy ornaments, almost Christmas baubles, while the fragility of the glass grenades also reference the fragile conditions of people forced to lead a nomadic life and live in exile like Hatoum.
Hatoum's "Nature morte" will be part of "Tender Objects: Emotion and Sensation after Minimalism" (January 21 - May 28, 2022; curated by the Department of Art History in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University) at The Warehouse, a Dallas-based project initiated by Howard and Cindy Rachofsky and the late Vernon Faulconer to make their collections available to curators, scholars, critics, and students.
Moving beyond the confines of traditional practices of painting and sculpture, "Tender Objects" will explore how artworks that adopt minimalist formal strategies can activate a fleeting, even indefinable, emotional response from viewers, provoking psychological and physical engagement.
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