2013.16: Hair Necklace (wood)
SculptureGallery Text
Hatoum, a Palestinian born in Beirut, uses everyday objects and personal artifacts to examine the effects of exile and alienation. For this work she collected strands of her own hair and painstakingly formed them into delicate round beads, threading them and placing them on an exquisitely carved wooden display bust. Inserted into the aestheticized space of a gallery, the hair beads — elegant and repulsive — address the disparities between the private and the public body. Hatoum grounds her work in the materiality of the body to convey a sense of the dislocation resulting from forced immigration. Born to exiled parents, she experienced disequilibrium a second time, in 1975, when the civil war in Lebanon compelled her to remain in England. With works such as Hair Necklace, Hatoum uses the most personal of materials — shed from her own body — to evoke the fragments of self one reclaims and values during such experiences of exile.
Identification and Creation
- Object Number
- 2013.16
- People
-
Mona Hatoum, Palestinian (Beirut, Lebanon born 1952)
- Title
- Hair Necklace (wood)
- Classification
- Sculpture
- Work Type
- sculpture
- Date
- 2013
- Culture
- Palestinian
- Persistent Link
- https://hvrd.art/o/348038
Physical Descriptions
- Medium
- Human hair and wooden bust
- Dimensions
-
bust: 28.6 x 21 x 17.8 cm (11 1/4 x 8 1/4 x 7 in.)
necklace: 19 cm (7 1/2 in.) - Inscriptions and Marks
-
- inscription: On bottom of bust, in graphite: 2/3
Provenance
- Recorded Ownership History
- Mona Hatoum, created 2013; [Alexander and Bonin, New York], sold; to the Harvard Art Museums, 2013.
State, Edition, Standard Reference Number
- Edition
- 2/3
Acquisition and Rights
- Credit Line
- Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Mr. G. David Thompson, in memory of his son, G. David Thompson, Jr., Class of 1958, by exchange
- Copyright
- © Mona Hatoum, courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York
- Accession Year
- 2013
- Object Number
- 2013.16
- Division
- Modern and Contemporary Art
- Contact
- am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu
- Permissions
-
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Publication History
- Hair Necklace, Very Vary Veri, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, 2017), No. 3, p. 31, ill. (b/w)
Exhibition History
- 32Q: 1120 Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, 11/16/2014 - 08/10/2017
- 32Q: 3620 University Study Gallery, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, 08/31/2019 - 01/08/2020
- Seeing in Art and Medicine, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, 09/02/2023 - 12/30/2023
Verification Level
This record has been reviewed by the curatorial staff but may be incomplete. Our records are frequently revised and enhanced. For more information please contact the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu