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Oil on cardboard  ,  27  x  34.5  cm.

Mona Hatoum, Grater Divide, 2002 Mild steel, 204 cm x variable width and depth

Take Grater Divide, 2002. The work is ridiculous: a standing metal cheese grater more than six feet high. Installed in a gallery, it works as a room divider, but the holes make privacy impossible. The wall is a weapon rather than a shield: A person undressing behind it could be cut as well as peeped at, opened up by sharp edges made for shredding. The work is not only an enlargement of a grater, however, but also a miniaturization of a divide, prototyping, in particular, the West Bank barrier Israel had begun to construct on appropriated Palestinian land. A person traveling through a border checkpoint may be asked to undress—strip searches are not prohibited by Israeli law. In the United States, they have been allowed ever since the 1985 Supreme Court case United States v. Rosa Elvira Montoya de Hernandez, which originated with the cavity search of Hernandez, who was traveling to Los Angeles from Colombia. In both countries, the coercive invasion of bodies is more likely to be visited on people of color, who are disproportionately singled out for selective or heightened “screening.” This word’s very meaning is reframed, or enlarged, by the Grater Divide. Gloria Anzaldúa, the queer Chicana theorist of Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), called the United States–Mexico border an “open wound” where “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” All borders are graters: not solid walls but permeable ones whose pores are sharpened to pierce what passes through.

 Église de Santa María à Iguácel (Huesca).

a very unsettling plate found in Cracow, Poland

Former soldiers study cake decorating at a vocational school in Puerto Rico, April 1951. Photograph by Justin Locke, National Geographic

Des Moines Tribune, Iowa, December 20, 1928

© Khanh Phan-Thi

AFGHANISTAN. Puli Khumri. 1992. © Steve McCurry/Magnum Photos

Kiyoshi Saito, Red Poppies, 1948

Art Nouveau, France by Jean Noel VILTARD

What do you need more of?

Philippe Petit’s incredible (and illegal) high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center, 1974

Sigmar Polke’s agate ‘stained glass’ windows for the Grossmunster church in Zurich