Measures of Distance

Mona Hatoum's seminal video work Measures of Distance, traced a mother/daughter relationship - a link played out across time and over geographical and cultural distance. It comprised voices, images and layers of words. Barely visible behind a veil of Arabic letters (and arranged so as to give the impression of looking through a barbed wire fence), the artist's mother was filmed taking a shower - a scene recalling a moment of intimacy in the artist's home in Beirut. Now "in exile", the daughter read aloud in English letters received from home; sentence after sentence, the mother expressed her longing for her daughter. The video could be seen as a continuation of Hatoum's earlier performance work: it represented a contrast between youth and age, between closeness and separation, homeland and exile. The end - a slow fading to darkness - was just Hatoum's voice: she continued reading, revealing that the family's only link to the outside world, the local post office, had been hit by a bomb.