blupoop:

Hanging Garden - Mona Hatoum

Hatoum’s piece Hanging Garden from 2008 is also a poetic reminder of personal and collective tragedies of displacement and exile. In this recent work, Hatoum fills burlap sacks filled with Jordanian soil and covers them with sprouting grass that smells of damp fertile earth. In doing so, she is creating a barricade structure that simultaneously references life and death. For viewers who have witnessed any one of the region’s ten wars in the last sixty years, the imposing installation evokes a sense of impending danger, powerlessness and vulnerability. The stalks of green grass signify the pervasive presence of barricades in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon where over time they become covered in grass. Yet the rough burlap material also contrasts the soft grass that symbolizes the persistence of life and nature’s ignorance of constructed barriers.