Shell Shock

Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma
Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO
06.04.18 – 11.08.18

A shadow is a shell of its counterpart. It is a reflected summary; an ominous silhouette of an object bathed in light. Some shadows are flighty, like Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up and whose shadow cannot quite be contained; others are stuck to us like glue, dark and expansive, lurking in our tracks at all times.

On a bright morning, the Gateway Arch will cast a distinct shadow upon downtown St. Louis, the city’s Old Courthouse and nearby Busch Stadium. On an equally vivid afternoon, the ‘Gateway to the West’ will instead motion towards the East, reflecting onto the Mississippi River and, beyond that, Illinois.

Just three miles from St. Louis, East St. Louis is a shell of its counterpart. St. Louis swarms with beer, barbeque and baseball, while its Eastern shadow lacks the bare necessities of a place to call home. Vacant lots, pollution from nearby chemical plants, families living on welfare and / or below the poverty line, staggering rates of violent crime; there would be little reason for someone from St. Louis to venture over to this side of the river, other than, perhaps, to pay homage to the childhood home of jazz legend Miles Davis. Residents of East St. Louis, on the other hand, are locked into the social and economic constraints of their shadow city, left to stare at a shining gateway that only grants access to those already living to the west of it.

Not too far from the Gateway Arch lies the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. This past April, the Pulitzer opened its doors to Mona Hatoum’s first major solo exhibition in the United States in over twenty years. Titled Terra Infirma, its translation into the context of St. Louis has had poignant reverberations. Designed in the 1990s by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, the Pulitzer undulates with natural light and negative space, and as we wander through the museum’s bunker-like galleries, Hatoum invites us to think about the larger shadows being cast beyond its concrete walls, past downtown St. Louis, through the Arch, across the Mississippi River, and into a neglected city where disaster has become commonplace.

‘Waiting is Forbidden’ declares a blue sign as we enter the exhibition. It could be mistaken for a security warning from the museum, were it not for the Arabic script above the English inscription. Taken out of its original context, where it would easily be read as ‘No Loitering’, the sign now serves as a dystopian reminder that the act of inaction is unacceptable in the alternative world that we have entered. Waiting will not get us anywhere, so we move along.

A steel and aluminium circle filled with sand occupies the Main Gallery. Reminiscent of a miniature Zen garden used to calm anxiety and reduce stress, the work, titled + and -, is split in two by a linear motor that steadily rakes uniform lines through one half of the sand at the same time as levelling the other half. One half creates, while the other destroys. The effect is curiously mesmerising, but unlike a Zen garden this perpetual motion is out of our control and our anxiety cannot seem to subside.

Nearby, what appears to be a grinding tool has been inflated to an enormous size. La grande broyeuse ( Mouli-Julienne × 17 ), a menacing steel structure, towers over us like a nightmare out of Alice in Wonderland, while its domestic familiarity stirs up a certain nostalgia. This obscuring of the meaning and utility of everyday objects is characteristic of Hatoum’s work, in which household items resemble torture devices and the most ordinary of objects feel ominous and strange. Like + and -, Hatoum’s practice thrives on duality and an ongoing tension between attraction and repulsion, elegant minimalism and the promise of danger.

Hatoum makes pointed art-historical references with works such as Impenetrable, an ode to the interactive op and kinetic art of Jesús Rafael Soto, while her subversive use of materials shatters their original interpretations. Unlike Soto’s Penetrable series, in which viewers are encouraged to get lost in suspended curtains of brightly coloured plastic tubes, Hatoum’s Impenetrable creates an impasse from all angles. Barbed black lines made of steel and fishing wire shoot down from the ceiling and prevent us from entering, although we cannot help but imagine what would happen if we did.

Downstairs, Hatoum continues to test us as we teeter on the brink of destruction. A baby’s crib has been constructed from glass laboratory tubes in Silence, giant cheese graters have been reimagined as perverse furniture in Dormiente and Grater Divide, shiny black marbles create a seductive circular void on the floor in Turbulence ( black ), and an entire domestic space has been electrified, rendered hazardous and inaccessible, in Homebound. Familiar items are thereby laced with hostile undertones, while the question of utility remains unclear. In No Way III, for instance, the holes in a colander have been plugged with steel nails, which now protrude outwards and threaten bodily harm. In T42 ( gold ), two teacups appear to have melted together, losing their usefulness and vanishing into a Surrealist dreamscape. Like Meret Oppenheim’s 1936 sculpture, Object, in which a classic teacup, saucer and spoon have been coated in fur, Hatoum’s work interrupts the meaning of things and dares us to re-evaluate the comforts of our homes.

In producing this volatility, Hatoum compels us to challenge our own notions of stability, whether it be in a gallery of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, a neighbourhood of St. Louis, a particular region of the United States, or any country in the world. After all, what is stable about a child growing up in poverty in a so-called First World country? What is stable about a nation where kids go to school fearing they might be shot to death by a classmate? What is stable about a border where children are torn from the arms of their immigrant parents? What is stable about political rhetoric that attacks women’s bodies, discriminates against minorities, and continually threatens nuclear warfare? Stability is relative. All it takes is one shift in scale, one skew in design, one obfuscation of utility, and the comfortable equilibrium of our realities will disintegrate into thin air.

With these slight alterations, Hatoum distorts our playful and childlike memories, taking symbols of safety and turning them sinister. In Misbah, a brass lantern hangs from the ceiling in a dark room and reflects images of war upon the walls as it spins round and round. Named after the Arabic word for ‘lamp’ or ‘light’, the work draws inspiration from an object that might otherwise lull a child to sleep or quell their fear of the dark. Now, we are swathed in a dizzying shadow-play of armed men and explosions that have come to haunt our dreams. What begins as unease is soon transformed into the realisation that this is not just a nightmare. For many children ( and adults ), there are concrete reasons to fear the dark; there are monsters that live under the bed; and threatening shadows do not only come out at night.

What happens when disaster does not only interrupt the normalcy of life, but becomes indistinguishable from it? In Terra Infirma, Hatoum presents a world in which exile is not just a physical reality but an emotional condition, and anyone can be made to feel like a stranger in their own home. We see instances of this all over the world, from Hatoum’s previous homes in Palestine and Lebanon, to the ongoing war in Syria, terror attacks and increased border control across the globe, and police brutality, racism and violence in cities across the United States, St. Louis included. For the lucky few, fear, paranoia, conflict and survival are figments of a distant world that they dare not penetrate; for millions of others, these emotions are played on a seemingly endless loop, like lines drawn in the sand and erased soon afterwards.

When a bomb explodes or a bullet is fired, all it leaves behind is a shell. There is no Zen garden to subdue the shock, no comfortable bed to sleep on, no favourite teacup to drink from, and no recognisable house to return to. All that is left is an ominous silhouette of a place once called home. Through her impeccable use of metaphor, Hatoum closes the distance between order and disorder, between our quiet haven and someone else’s chaotic hell. As disaster and disarray become more normalised each day, Terra Infirma offers a moment of silent contemplation for us to consider how much discomfort we, as a society, can truly impart and / or endure.

‘Waiting is Forbidden’, Hatoum reminds us as we conclude the exhibition and make our way back to the entrance. Beyond the museum’s walls, the ground does not feel so stable anymore; our shadow does not feel so flighty; and that bridge to East St. Louis does not feel so long.