Hair Mesh 2013

Mona Hatoum made this, I want to say, net curtain, out of human hair. I like to imagine her collecting the hair, like a kind of obsessive act, combing and gathering, maybe from a salon floor, or her own brush, maybe even stitching it, each strand a tiny gesture, an act of repetition. Each square, a little meditation. And how does it feel to stand before this piece, knowing its material? Does it make your skin crawl? Does it make you think about where hair comes from, what it means? It’s this intimate, bodily thing, suddenly made public, transformed into a kind of architecture. A screen, a barrier, but one that’s also incredibly fragile. It's like a minimalist Agnes Martin painting, but made from something so viscerally human. It’s clever, how she takes something so simple and turns it into something so loaded, so unsettling.