Mona Hatoum

Current Disturbance, 1996 Mona Hatoum, Palestinian, born Beirut 1952, lives in London Current Disturbance, 1996 Installation: Wood, wire mesh, lightbulbs, computerized dimmer switch, amplifier, four speakers 280 x 550 x 504 cm Gift of Wendy Silverman, Thomas Schulhof, and Michael Schulhof, in honor of their parents Hannelore and Rudolph Schulhof, New York, to American Friends of the Israel Museum B98.0017 Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum creates deeply personal and political works relating to the body, the artistic language of Minimalism, and the condition of exile. In Current Disturbance, she used varying electrical current in lightbulbs to generate effects of sight and sound. The bulbs fade on and off randomly and at various levels of intensity. Sometimes the current makes a crackling sound, and at other times a humming. It is like a malfunctioning nerve center in which some of the synapses fail to connect. In formal terms, the rather pure geometric grid is minimalist; in associative terms, it recalls a prison cell, a camp, territory that is out of bounds. There is no entrance or exit, so viewers can only walk around this closed-off no-man’s-land, an empty inner space that nevertheless implies a human presence or absence. The flickering lights, like hundreds of tiny lighthouses, transmit a message of warning but perhaps also of hope of rescue. source: http://www.english.imjnet.org.il/htmls/popup.aspx?c0=13328&bsp=13272