Private Dis-Pleasures: Mona Hatoum, Mediated Bodies and the Peep Show

In subject and mode of presentation, Mona Hatoum’s 1980s and 90s video works centring on the body drew on the history of pornographic and medical imaging techniques. Making comparisons to porn peepshows and MRI, both of which were newsworthy in Britain (for very different reasons) when Hatoum left Lebanon to study art in London in the 1970s, this chapter provides a close analysis of a handful of her installations, chief among them her Corps Etranger of 1994. It examines how Hatoum’s heavily mediated images and carefully constructed environments raised questions about gender, sexuality, and the identity politics of social space. Just as peepshows became political battlegrounds eliciting heavy government regulation by testing the rules of public space and social interaction, Hatoum’s installations tested the rules and expectations of art exhibition spaces. These works opened zones where visitors would become equally aware of the potential for transgression and surveillance in their own daily performance of body and self.