Mona Hatoum staged a series of performances in the 1980s that were documented on video. Among them is Variation on Discord and Divisions (1984), with a running time of 27’45’’. It is based on a performance the artist presented on 14 December 1984 at The Western Front in Vancouver, which lasted approximately 40–50 minutes.
At first, the camera captures the stage from the audience’s perspective: a room lined with newspaper. Almost unnoticed, Hatoum, dressed in a grey overall and a stocking mask, crawls through the rows of chairs onto the stage. There, she scrubs the floor with red-tinted water suggestive of blood, cuts holes into the stocking mask with a long knife and blood-smeared hands, and sets a table with plates on which she serves raw, bloody kidneys that she has pulled from beneath her clothing.
In this performance, Hatoum employs both gesture and action to play with the reversal of victim and perpetrator roles. The work is directed towards interaction with the audience, whom the artist forces out of a passive, observing position by handing them plates of blood-smeared viscera.
