On view in the front gallery will be Twelve Windows (2012-13), an installation comprised of one-meter-square embroidered pieces of fabric, attached with wooden clothe pins at irregular intervals to a steel cable which traverses the room.
Alexander and Bonin will begin the fall season with a one-person exhibition of recent work by
Mona Hatoum.
On view in the front gallery will be Twelve Windows (2012-13), an installation comprised of one-
meter-square embroidered pieces of fabric, attached with wooden clothe pins at irregular
intervals to a steel cable which traverses the room. These twelve embroidered panels are the work
of Inaash; a Lebanese NGO founded in 1969 to provide employment for Palestinian women in
refugee camps in Lebanon. Researched and designed by Malak Husseini Abdulrahim, the panels
feature traditional Palestinian needlework which has been passed down for centuries. The act of
embroidery functions as an act of resistance against the discontinuities of exile. Each ‘window’
represents, through its motifs, stitches, colors and patterns, a key region of Palestine. Pinned to a
cable which crisscrosses the space, the embroideries and clothe pins evoke images of everyday
life even as the cable dissects and disrupts the exhibition space, creating a metaphor for a
divided territory.
In the second gallery, Hatoum will exhibit Cells (2014), a steel and glass work whose form relates to
earlier iconic installations such as Light Sentence (1992). A bank of 32 institutional lockers are
populated by numerous hand-blown glass shapes, each suggestive of an organic bodily form.
These corporal motifs are also explored in several recent drawings and a new work composed
entirely of human hair. For Hair Mesh (2013), Hatoum has knotted and woven together hair in
three shades of brown, to create a minimal grid; an organized and precise pattern that vividly
contrasts with the unstable and organic material from which it is composed.
From 1980 – 89 performance and video predominated Mona Hatoum’s work. She began to
exhibit installations and objects in 1989 and her work has been the subject of numerous one-
person museum exhibitions in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. In December, Hatoum’s
first solo museum exhibition in South America opens at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo
and travels to Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires in March, 2015. A survey exhibition organized by
Centre Pompidou will open in Paris in June 2015 and travel to additional European venues in 2016.
Image: Mona Hatoum with Inaash, Twelve Windows (2012-13)
Images of work, a biography and selected writings on Hatoum can be found on our website –
alexanderandbonin.com. For press inquiries, please contact Kathryn Gile at 212.367.7474 or
kg@alexanderandbonin.com.
opening Saturday, September 13, 6-8 pm
Alexander and Bonin
132 Tenth Avenue - New York, NY 10011
Summer hours:
Tuesday - Friday
10am - 6pm