Mona Hatoum was born in Palestine, spent her early childhood in Lebanon, and has since lived in the UK and France. This work has an added poignancy given the terrible events of the last few months, albeit an unintended one since it was made in 1996. 2,200 bars of olive soap are arranged in a grid on the floor. Hatoum then added scores of tiny beaded pins which demarcate the boundaries of land in Gaza and the West Bank which Israel had theoretically agreed to hand over to the Palestinians during the Oslo Peace Accords agreed in negotiations in 1993. That has never happened.
Olive soap has been made in Palestine (and more widely over the Middle East) for centuries so the work is redolent of an ancient culture. The mass of olive blocks, uneven with their shadowed gaps, could almost suggest a desert landscape. You can still just about smell the soap now in Tate Britain. Hatoum records how its scent had an immediate impact on viewers when it was first exhibited in Jerusalem in 1996. The title is suggestive – the ‘present’ situation (as it was in 1996) was certainly one of tension – but those two words also invite us to compare the contemporary failure of modern politics with something much, much older. We have yet to find any kind of reconciliation between the two. Other contrasts suggest themselves: the rectilinear grid versus the curved lines of the beads, for example; and while both grids and maps could be viewed as instruments of order and control the connotations of soap (which cleanses, fades and washes away) are completely different.
One has to be very careful with words dealing with these issues but I would say that while it is not an unpartisan work neither is it angry in tone. Hatoum’s comments are implied, discreet, understated. It is also no accident on the part of the Tate that, for the sake of political balance, this work hangs next to a painting by Kitaj of a Jewish wedding.
