Summary Of 'Under Siege' By Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum has experience with being confronted with patriarchal power structures and experiencing both a feeling of displacement and of being marginalised. Hatoum is a Palestinian artist born in the Lebanon. Although she was born in the Lebanon she was never able to obtain a Lebanese passport. She was later exiled to London where she stayed because she was unable to return to Beirut because of the war. "If you come from embattled background, there is often an expectation that your work should somehow articulate the struggle - I find myself wanting to contradict those expectations." (2001, p.19) Unwilling to be defined by these circumstances or 'victimised ' as hooks writes, Hatoum uses her lived experiences to present the audience with different perspectives. This position that Hatoum holds, this 'plurality of vision ' (W.Said, 1984, p36.) gives her the insight to middle eastern and western cultures and their restrictions and gives her an oppositional view to these social structures. The body has been central to Hatoum’s work, which Amelia Jones argues, "negotiate the dislocating effects of social and private experience in the late capitalist, postcolonial Western world." (1998, p.1) This can been seen in her performance piece 'Under Siege ' where she deals with issues of being an exile, the struggle of separation and

In later work, Hatoum replaces her body "with a physically absent body" (Deucher &Wagstaff, 2000, p.28) which allows for projection and identification, the absent body becomes a representation of the socially