Mona Hatoum’s “Over, under and in between”

True to its title, “Over, under and in between” takes viewers on a purposeful walk through new and recent work by Mona Hatoum. The austerity of the exhibition’s setting—three installations of glass and steel in three concrete rooms—heightens the drama of its three prepositional acts. Together they induce visitors to wander through these spaces and around these objects while considering their function as conduits between one thing and another. The experience of this journey, like Alice feeling always too big or too small in Wonderland, demands a continual readjustment not only of expectations—people tend to love or hate Hatoum’s work—but also of the modes of resistance and surrender that her encompassing installations so skillfully, some might say manipulatively, inspire. 

In the first room, hundreds of handblown glass balls are strung along thin steel wires and suspended overhead, creating a delicate pattern of drooping concentric circles that radiate outward from the elevated center of the space. The obvious allusion is to dew drops on a spider’s web. But this iteration of Web (2026), one of several installations of the same name that Hatoum has been making since 2006, also evokes a constellation of stars in the night sky, a lazy string of outdoor party lights, and the hanging chandeliers of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which is to say, a complicated matrix of mnemonic associations and interpretations.

In the second room, thousands of smaller glass balls, all of them red and scaled between ping pong balls and marbles, have been painstakingly arranged on the floor in the shapes of continents, islands, and other scattered landmasses, replicating a fragile map of the world (and with it a more comical threat of slipping on those marbles and falling flat on your ass). The catch here is that Hatoum, again working in a typology that repeats throughout her oeuvre, has based this Map (red) (2026) not on the ubiquitous Mercator projection (introduced in 1569), which misrepresents the size of certain continents (Europe and North America) in relation to others (Africa and South America), but on the more accurate Gall–Peters projection (1855). In correcting such distortions, both the Gall–Peters projection and Hatoum’s installation critique a world order based on imperial interests while exposing the potential for reconfiguring that order and, moreover, redistributing its political power.

In the last room, Hatoum connects the “over” of Web and the “under” of Map (red) to all of a quiver (2022) as her “in between.” Originally produced for a retrospective in Berlin, all of a quiver is a minimalist steel tower, constructed in the form of an open grid—three squares wide, four squares deep, and nine squares high.1 The formidable structure stands on the floor yet hangs from the ceiling. At periodic intervals, the whole thing buckles and bends and appears to dance via an elaborate though barely visible system of pulleys. As the “building” collapses and recomposes itself, the sounds range from minor whining to terrifying creaks and squeals. At one point, I found myself in the room as the grids began to fold. A small child (not mine) cried in horror and fled from the room, only to rush back in, gesturing to the lurching structure with facial expressions and a body language of absolute delight.

Linked together, these works—on view in the old storage tanks, or Cisterna, of this former gin distillery—demonstrate Hatoum at her alchemical best. From one installation to another and the next, she transmutes the most common materials into far-reaching reflections on how we (a defiantly universal and universalist we) relate to one another, make sense of our lives, deal with the beauties and horrors of our world, and, somewhere along the way, create something like meaning itself. It is in this sense that they resemble prepositions: words or phrases that mean little on their own but are indispensable in forging connections. If meaning depends on establishing relationships—between an artist and her materials, artworks and their audiences, selves and others, or a people and their world—then prepositions are everything.

At the risk of overemphasizing her biography, it helps to rehearse Hatoum’s origins. She was born in Beirut to a Palestinian family that was, like so many others, never granted Lebanese citizenship. She went to French schools, studied graphic design, and took a job in advertising. Then, having traveled to London just prior to the outbreak of Lebanon’s civil war, she went to the Slade School of Art and became an artist, working primarily in performance and video. Alongside Sonia Boyce and Lubaina Himid, she was featured in Rasheed Araeen’s groundbreaking exhibition “The Other Story” at London’s Hayward Gallery (1989–90). Her standing as an artist has been more or less stratospheric even since.

That said, Hatoum is famously (understandably) averse to being pigeonholed and refuses to be anyone’s spokesperson. In an interview with Janine Antoni for Bomb in 1998, she said: “I’ve always had quite a rebellious and contrary attitude. The more I feel I am being pushed into a mold, the more I feel like going in the opposite direction.”2 Even when Edward Said, in 2000, wrote that “No one has put the Palestinian experience in visual terms so austerely and yet so playfully, so compellingly and at the same moment so allusively,” she demurred, explaining in 2006 that it was only his opinion, filtered through his own experience, and that really, her work “is not so specifically to do with the Palestinian issue.”3

Yet starting in 1996, Hatoum began a series of self-styled residencies in Jerusalem, Cairo, Amman, and Beirut, where she produced new work, often in collaboration with local artisans. She joked, kind of, that going to these “obscure little places” was “not fantastic for my career.”4 But those residencies, and the exhibitions they provoked, helped to validate a generation of arts organizations—the Anadiel Gallery, the Townhouse Gallery, Darat al Funun, the Beirut Art Center—that struggled for visibility in an international art world conditioned (whether by 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror or by the history of colonialism) to view the Middle East and North Africa as backward. Hatoum’s engagement with the region helped to repudiate such anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiments within recognizable frames of reference. Without articulating it as such, her work insists on the equality of all people while dismissing as stupid the borders they draw. And for sure, her installations on exile, destruction, and dispossession have meant more to Palestinian viewers than any one artist could grasp, much less verbalize, in formal interviews.

Exemplifying the diametric opposition of her critics, just as Peter Schjeldahl made Hatoum an exemplar of a “bland while perhaps hotly spiced” cosmopolitanism, his coeval Guy Brett wrote warmly of her border crossings, pluralities, and reciprocities.5 “We can no longer exist by trying to annihilate the ‘other,’” Brett wrote in response.6 He celebrated the same refusals, indirection, and ambivalence that Schjeldahl so resented on the grounds that they were “both critical and affirmative . . . a way of keeping a liberating and hopeful perspective alive.”7

In that sense, the primary materials of Hatoum’s three installations in Milan may be neither glass nor steel but rather sunlight drifting through the windows of the Cisterna, casting grid-like shadows moving slowly across the floor, reflecting off the glass balls and flooding into the matte black squares. If context is the ultimate prepositional embrace, then maybe in Hatoum’s arms, it isn’t about reflecting reality as it is but rather about proposing an outline of how it could be—overwhelmingly delightful, occasionally frightening, strangely bashful, and, as yet, utterly unknowable.