Director, Glenn Lowry: Alexandra Schwartz, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Drawings.
Curator, Alexandra Schwartz: Mona Hatoum often deals with domestic spaces, and the fear and claustrophobia that ideas of domesticity can give rise to.
This is an actual imprint of a kitchen grater that she made with paper. So you're seeing very faintly the form of just an ordinary kitchen grater. And it was part of a series that she did of kitchen objects, where she would do similar impressions. She's talked about them having this uncanny quality, it both looks familiar, because most of us have kitchen graters, but also seeing it in this form as this ghostly impression, it has this surreal, unnerving quality.
She says that when she was growing up women around her were taught the art of cooking, because it was something they needed to prepare for marriage. And she really had an antagonistic relationship to that idea, and wanted to subvert that, and criticize that a little bit.
Glenn Lowry: Nearby is Hatoum’s Rubber Mat.
Alexandra Schwartz: The rubber mat plays on these themes of the body. So literally intestines, part of the body, seeing something that is in the interior of the body brought into the exterior, into the world. And also domesticity, a rug, something that you walk on all the time. And she says there's kind of an attraction/repulsion operating there as well, that you both want to touch it, it has this very interesting sensual feeling to it, but it has this real violence to it as well.