La table des négociations

A video projector shows a photograph and a text (from The Artist’s Body by Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones) recounting a performance by Mona Hatoum made in 1983. Two chairs face each other. Between them, a table, ordinary. On this table, a bin bag wrapping my body. Around this installation, lit by a single rather weak lamp, speakers broadcast sitcom laughter.

About Mona Hatoum’s performance:

« Mona Hatoum lay stretched out on a table lit by a spotlight for three hours. Her body, covered with viscera, blood and bandages, was enclosed in a military body bag, like a war casualty. A soundtrack broadcast into the empty space the words of Western politicians speaking of peace, which heightened the pathos of this (symbolically) brutalised body and the impersonal coldness of the environment. Mona Hatoum thus evoked the gulf between the reality of war and the way politicians and the media serve it up to our appetite for consumption. »