Changing Parts (1984)
By Mona Hatoum
Hatoum made Changing Parts during a year's residency at Western Front Art Centre in Vancouver, Canada. It is a Western Front Production. It operates through the juxtaposition of two strands of ambiguously contrasting image and sound. She has said: 'I want to remind the audience that there are different realities that people have to live through … Changing Parts … is about such different realities - the big contrast between a priviledged space, like the West, and the Third World where there's death, destruction, hunger.' (Quoted in Mona Hatoum, 1997, p.127.) Material for one part of the video was derived from super-8 footage of a seven hour performance Hatoum made in 1982 at the London Film Makers Co-op and Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth, titled Under Siege, in which she moved around in a transparent plastic cubicle-like container filled with mud. In Changing Parts, grainy freeze-frame images of the artist's face and mouth as she struggles to bite and tear her way out of the mud-smeared plastic membrane are intercut with a series of black and white photographs of a bathroom interior. These were taken in the bathroom in Beirut while Hatoum was visiting her family. The video begins with…
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