Quarters

Mona Hatoum

1996

Cor-Ten Steel and mild steel

Dallas Museum of Art

Mona Hatoum explores ideas of violence, oppression, pain, barriers, and control in Quarters by recalling institutional and highly regulated sleeping quarters such as military bunkers and prison cells. She says, "I want the work to have a strong formal presence, and through the physical experience to activate a psychological and emotional response. In a very general sense I want to create a situation where reality itself becomes a questionable point. Where viewers have to reassess their assumptions and their relationship to things around them. A kind of self-examination and an examination of the power structures that control us: Am I