24 November – 22 December 2006 Private View Thursday 23 November 2006, 6-8pm
White Cube, 25-26 Mason's Yard, London SW1Y 6BU White Cube Mason’s Yard is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Mona Hatoum, her first solo exhibition in London since 2002.

In the ground floor gallery, Hatoum will present a new sculpture entitled Hot Spot that interrogates the notions of ‘boundaries’ through the depiction of a world map – an ongoing theme in the artist’s work. Hot Spot is a cage-like globe, approximately the size of a person’s height and arm span, which tilts at the same angle as the earth. Using delicate neon to outline the contours of the world on its surface, the work buzzes with an intense energy, bathing its surroundings in a luminescent red glow. Compelling and seemingly dangerous, Hot Spot suggests that it is not simply contested border zones that are political hot spots but an entire global situation: what Hatoum describes as a ‘world continually caught up in conflict and unrest’. The gallery will also contain another map in the form of a work on paper entitled Projection. A white on white work that uses cotton and abaca to create its image, Projection presents what to most viewers is an unfamiliar image of the world since it uses the ‘Peters’ projection, an egalitarian representation of land mass in true proportion as opposed to the more usual visualisation of the globe from a dominant northerly perspective. The image in Projection presents a positive-negative reversal, where the continents appear like fissures or gaps, as if they have been etched or corroded away.

(more…)