#grater divide

Mona Hatoum Grater Divide (2002)

In the late 1980s she began to make installations and sculptures in a wide range of materials.

These often use the grid or geometric forms to reference to systems of control within society. She has made a number of works using household objects which are scaled up or changed to make them familiar but uncanny.

Grater Divide mimics a room divider, like those used in changing rooms or hospitals. You’ll quite quickly notice, however, that this object is a 6 ft cheese grater. The piece is both comical and sinister, strangely graceful as a sculptural piece. The holes in the kitchen utensil are relatively harmless, but scaled up to these proportions they become threatening and potentially harmful. (from tate.org)

Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, Lebanon and now lives and works in London.

Grater Divide - Mona Hatoum

Hatoum's sculpture has a profound physical presence not only because of its scale but also because of the way it subverts the familiar. Grater Divide is an oversize kitchen utensil whose sharp edges seem less suited to utility than to a more ominous purpose. The resulting tension may bring to mind universal cultural, social, and political divisions. The art of Hatoum-of Middle Eastern descent but living in the West-is autobiographical and also refers to earlier artistic concepts. Here, while the use of industrial materials, clean lines, and grand scale recall Minimalist aesthetics, the transformation of a recognizable object and introduction of patterning-suggestive of Islamic scrollwork-make Grater Divide very much a work of the present.

This piece is called Grater Divide.