Changing Parts

Mona Hatoum was born in 1952 to Palestinian parents living in Beirut. When the Lebanese Civil War broke out in her home country in 1975, she was staying abroad in London and could not return to Lebanon. In the video Changing Parts (1984), created almost ten years later, she addresses the feelings of fear, helplessness, and homesickness that overcame her after being separated from her family. The film begins with cross-fades of black-and-white photographs of the bathroom in her parents’ house in Beirut and is accompanied by the sound of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No. 4. From the middle of the film onwards, short sequences appear from her seven-hour performance Under Siege, which she staged in 1982 at the London Film-Makers’ Co-op and documented on Super 8 film. The artist is seen naked, trapped in a plexiglass basin filled with mud, from which she tries to escape. The soundtrack consists of interference noises from news broadcasts. In her video Changing Parts, Hatoum shows the stark contrast between two different worlds of life and feeling to which she was exposed as a young woman in her involuntary exile in London.