Hair Necklace (wood)

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.