Origin: UK | Fiction | Director: Mona Hatoum | 15 minutes

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Measures of distance

Mona Hatoum 1988 fiction 15 min.

Mona Hatoum's video work Measures of Distance, traces a motherdaughter
relationship. Links between the two women are played out across time and
over geographical and cultural distance. This experimental video work by
one of the most celebrated Palestinian contemporary artists comprises
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 is filmed taking a shower a scene
recalling a moment of intimacy in the artist's home in Beirut. Now in
"exile", the daughter reads aloud in English letters received from home
sentence after sentence, the mother expresses her longing for her daughter.
The video can be seen as a continuation of Hatoum's earlier performance
work: it represents a contrast between youth and age, between closeness and
separation, homeland and exile.

Full feature: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x31gw4

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