So Much I Want to Say (1983) is one of the earliest video works by the Palestinian-British artist Mona Hatoum. It is based on footage recorded during a live performance in Vancouver and transmitted via satellite to Vienna. The work consists of black-and-white still images that appear and disappear at eight-second intervals. They show the artist’s face with her mouth shut by male hands. Although she struggles fiercely, she is unable to free herself from their grip. A female voice can be heard in the video, endlessly repeating “So much I want to say”, which is also the title of the 1983 performance presented in Vancouver at the Western Front Art Centre.
Mona Hatoum grew up in a Palestinian family in Beirut and was caught in London by the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. Her family had already experienced displacement, having originally lived in Haifa and fled to Lebanon in 1948 ahead of the establishment of the state of Israel. Hatoum settled in London, studied art, and developed a practice that addresses themes of war, displacement, and violence from a Feminist perspective.
The stills of So Much I Want to Say, with their poor quality, recall live news broadcasts from warzones in the 1980s. They stand for a woman who has much to say but cannot be heard by her audience. With this video, Hatoum embodies the fate of political minorities whose concerns find little resonance in the Western world.
