Mona Hatoum at The ICA Boston

Mona Hatoum’s sculpture Caught-up (2021) created for the exhibition ‘To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood’, is on show at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Hatoum’s work uses an infant’s cot which she found at a flea market many years ago. Inside this cream-coloured cot, spanning all of its interior space, are wavering lines of deep red glass beads which delineate a beautiful spider’s web. The beaded web functions much like a net – a potentially threatening device but also a protective one, while the cot acts as a proxy for the child’s body. As curator Ruth Erickson writes in the exhibition catalogue, ‘Caught-up holds in tension a sense of new life and death, of care and neglect, of the found and the created.’ This work exemplifies Mona’s transformation of domestic objects into works that seem disorientating, inhospitable, or even haunting.

The exhibition explores the connection between childhood and visual art practices, ‘Highlighting the ways aesthetic representation, economic, geographic, ethnic and cultural background fundamentally shape how we experience and understand childhood, the exhibition ‘crafts an important narrative about modernism, innocence, and […] institutional structures,’ says Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director.