Mona Hatoum's life and work consistently defy the notion of identity as something fixed and easily definable. Accordingly, she has developed a wide-ranging oeuvre that includes sculpture, video, installation, photography, performance, and works on paper. Complexities of war, exile, and displacement are evoked in Measures of Distance (1988), in which a recording of an animated conversation in Arabic between Hatoum and her mother is overlaid by Hatoum's somber voice slowly reading her mother’s letters in English. The written Arabic script of the letters covers the frame and acts as a screen, both concealing and revealing a series of nude images of the mother.
Measures of Distance by Mona Hatoum screens from 1 July through 31 July on a media station in the ART building located on the corner of East 23rd Street and San Jacinto Boulevard.