When Mona Hatoum left the Lebanon, she left her Palestinian family behind, her mother in particular. Measures of Distance relates the pain of this separation.

Abstract forms are being drawn behind a surface chequered with words written in Arabic. This veil, this opaque partition, placed as a second screen between our glance and the image, is the actual content of a letter from the mother to the a rtist. A love letter torn by the distance that enfolds the image in a closed prison space. It relates doubt and hope, real, daily life, the war, and the lost images of a shared life. The impossible link is made, fixed by photos which are superimposed on the surface grill, and which generate another movement of the memory, progressively revealing by fragments the denuded form of the mother. For, whereas photography is a trace of what has been, an object capable of recovering a past, devastated moment, a video image can blend this reality into another time and another space, an imaginary moment of life in-between the two.

Mona Hatoum constructs layers of levels of reading and representation, an ambivalent sense of the aesthetic which includes both distance and proximity. The epistolary membrane serves as a third body, as a place of intersection, and simultan eously evidences the boundaries which turn away the artist's glance and all that associates her with her origins.

Stéphanie Moisdon