Routes AP

Cartographic themes find expression in a large number of works by Mona Hatoum, a British artist of Palestinian descent. Born to exiled Palestinian parents in Beirut, Lebanon, Hatoum was in the UK when a civil war broke out in Lebanon, preventing her return. It is perhaps her experience as an exile that prompts Hatoum’s interest in the relationship between power and cartographic constructions of space.

In 1996, during a visit to Jerusalem, she made Present Tense (1996) an installation made of locally produced soap bars on which Hatoum etched with red beads the fragmented map of Palestine drawn up under the Oslo accord. Maps recur in several of Hatoum’s works, such as Hot Spot (2006), where she outlined continents on a steel globe using neon tubes that glowed like heated wires, or Projection (2006), a deceptively simple map of the world made on off-white cotton that follows Peters Projection–a controversial representation of continental masses that rejects the traditional world map with its inflated Northern Hemisphere.

Exhibited at the Biennale, Routes AP (2003) is a playful intervention on maps found in in-flight magazines. For these drawings, Hatoum filled with colour the spaces that lie between lines denoting aircraft movement. The resultant mesh resembles a complex climatic map that disrupts national boundaries and liberates the landscape.