“At first, a work of art is experienced physically. Meanings, connotations, and associations only come after the initial physical experience when the imagination, the mind, and the soul are kindled by what you’ve seen.” (Mona Hatoum)

Hanging Garden of 2008, Mona Hatoum’s eight-meter wall of jute sandbags was transplanted to Karlsplatz square in downtown Vienna. Piled up to a height of 1.70 m, the bags first looked familiar: a ubiquitous element of the architecture of conflict, well known from the news or documentary photos from war zones. In the pulsating cultural context of the Karlsplatz, one of the urban centers of Vienna, the work seemed oddly out of place, all the more so since the sprouting rich green tufts of grass and weeds appeared to indicate that it had been there for some time.
Experiences of war and exile inform many of Mona Hatoum’s works and are in line with her strategy of alienating objects by placing them in disconcerting new contexts. The familiar and the alien change places, and Hatoum sows the seeds of doubt precisely amongst the things we take for granted most. In her works, the comforting and familiar take on something menacing, while the accouterments of war appear to look elegant, attractive, even seductive.
Hatoum’s Hanging Garden was a free-standing sculpture in public space reminiscent of works of Italian arte povera or American Land Art. However, the piece also was a provocation that commemorated not only war and the devastation it entails but also those whose life goes on regardless. With time, the sandbags no longer hit the eye, but became part of the landscape and the site of a different weed-ridden ecosystem that grew out from between the cracks of war.

Text: Kirsty Bell