• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
• /
• no.10
• /
• pp.85-103
• /
• 2010

Mona Hatoum and community make unlikely bedfellows. From her beginnings as a teenage exile to her maturity as an internationally celebrated artistic nomad, Hatoum defies classification within any single geographical or cultural community. Attempting, however, to locate specific points of contact between her and certain communities in terms of artist-in-residence projects in which she participated might be a particularly fruitful way of circumventing her notorious critical resistance to identity and her refusal of homogeneity. This paper starts with Miwon Kwon's critique of contemporary practices in community-based art, which locate an essentialising force that isolates a single point of commonality and overlooks authentic differences. It then turns to Jean-Luc Nancy's reconceptualization of community as 'unworked' and 'being-in-common' to provide analytical tools for avoiding the dangers of essentialism. By examining the three residencies that Hatoum accepted in the mid-1990s in the light of Nancy's observations and theories, and by bringing the idea of artistic nomadism and that of community into juxtaposition, we hope to show that Hatoum succeeds in finding an equilibrium between art and community, and that this sheds new light on the issues raised in recent discussions on such relationship.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
• /
• no.15
• /
• pp.111-135
• /
• 2013

This study explores gender images represented in the works of women artists from the Middle East, where male chauvinism is recognized to be more predominant than elsewhere. The artists included in this study such as Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, Lida Abdul and Sigalit Landau are Post-Feminist generation of artists who were born in the Middle East but spent significant amount of time in the West. In addition, they were trained as artists under the influences of the Western Feminist Art. This particular group of female artists pays much attention to the ontological question of their identities rather than male/female inequality, and each artist represents men and women in the ways that can hardly be found in the works by women artists in the West. These artists not only connect gender identities to the socio-political geography of the Middle East but also deconstruct Western stereotypes of men and women from Arab world. The paper focuses on the way these women artists incorporate male/female vs. culture/nature dichotomies into their works to subvert the premises on which Western Feminism has been based and not only to cast light on women's freedom and their ontological conflicts but also to emphasize social suppression inflicted upon men. In such process, these artists resist stereotypical images of Middle Eastern men and women widely circulated in the mainstream media of the West.