Mona Hatoum’s show begins with an indelible afterimage of modern war. Into a stack of welded steel boxes resembling an apartment block in a city that could be anywhere, Hatoum has melted or blasted holes imitating drone or missile strikes. Parts of interior walls and floors have been shorn away to look like apartments with their fronts blown off. This is the shell of what was once a home to many, emptied out by war, like the buildings you saw on the news last night.
Hatoum created Bourj, which means “tower” in Arabic, for an exhibition in Beirut, the city where she was born into a Palestinian family in 1952. Since 1975 she has been based in London but her art knows no peace. Home and family are perforated by violence. A steel cot resembling a prison cell has cheese wire in place of a soft mattress. A kitchen with small chairs for the kids, alongside larger ones for mum and dad, has been incinerated, and the carbonised fragments of wooden furniture painstakingly reassembled inside wire mesh replicas of what they looked like before the disaster.
