Mona Hatoum

"Keffieh," by Mona Hatoum, (1993-99), human hair on cotton, 1993-1999, collection Peter Norton, Santa Monica

Mona Hatoum uses Human hair as well as images and footage of her own body in her work. In the above piece she has interwoven pieces of women's hair into a traditional Arab head scarf worn only by males. Issues of gender and suppression surround this piece. There is something beautiful and at the same time grotesque about wearing the hair of another human as decoration and I find this ibject quite unsettling and repulsive. The use of hair makes the work quite intimate and is a familiar thing as we all have it although it shifts to being uncomfortable when taken out of context and removed from our bodies.

"The macho style is an externalized response to the powers of domination; but it is also a form of domination turned inward, within the community poised against the presence of women, whose voices are either repressed, or sublimated in the cause of struggle. Hatoum's feminized headscarf reveals this disavowal of the place of women and re-inserts their point of view through the embroidered strands of hair that hang loose beyond the boundary, breaking the pictorial grid of the material in the process of redefining the symbolic surface of political struggle." source

A series of etchings called 'Hair, there and everywhere' are collections of hair which look as though some have been arranged into patterns and others just laid there. You can make out images yourself and imagine what creatres could be hiding amongst the interweaving curling lines but you can't quite tell if she had intentionally made images amongst the hair.This work is very intense and involves a lot of human hair, I would love to know who it belonged to and how she obtained it because this has a lot of implications. I likt to think that it is her own, that in a way she suffered for her art and what she believes in, putting a part of herself into the work. This seems to have been the case with previous works such as 'Corps étranger' (1994) or ‘Deep Throat’ (1996), installations that use endoscopic journies through the interior landscape of the artist’s own body. This work also used leather and beeswax, materials from animals in conjunction with human derived material. The leather is durable, the human hair seems fragile, not holding the suitcases together, awkwardly fumbling across the gap.This work 'Van Gogh's Back' (1995) is very light hearted and fun. It reminds me of playing in the bath with shampoo in my hair and making fun shapes. I love her different uses of hair and the Human body, all of them have vastly different effects on me wether that be repulsion, fascination or just very thought provoking.