Eyes Skinned

Description:

While in residence at Western Front, Mona Hatoum developed the single-channel video Eyes Skinned, a single-channel video that interweaves images and audio fragments documenting the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in refugee camps in Beirut.

Hatoum appears shrouded in a black hood, reducing her features to faint contours. She repeatedly covers her face with her hands as news photographs of torture and brutality are projected onto her, obscuring and revealing the images in turn. 

A steady sound of breathing underpins the video, overlaid with news reports on the systematic eradication of Palestinian people during the Lebanese Civil War. Throughout the work, Hatoum traces the contours of her eyes with a knife as if attempting to cut them open to keep her from seeing, yet the images she tries to escape relentlessly appear whenever she covers her eyes. 

Video documentation is available upon request.