3 to 1: Mona Hatoum, glass, bottles, and migration

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3 to 1 is a video series that presents three unique perspectives on one artwork from the San José Museum of Art's permanent collection. Watch as artists, curators, educators, designers, scientists, engineers, and more, provide their take on the creative moment. In this video, glass artist Tali Grinshpan, Catherine S. Ramirez from UC Santa Cruz, and SJMA assistant curator Kathryn Wade offer insight into Mona Hatoum’s artistic practice, her formal approach to glass, and the mutability of home.

Kathryn Wade
I'm Kathryn Wade. I'm Assistant Curator at the San José Museum of Art.

Tali Grinshpan
My name is Tali Grinshpan. I'm an artist working mainly with glass.

Catherine Ramirez
My name is Catherine Ramirez and I am Chair of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz, where I teach classes on migration and citizenship. And I’m at the San José Museum of Art to discuss Mona Hatoum's Drowning Sorrows.

Hatoum's Drowning Sorrows is an installation that consists of 96 clear glass bottle fragments. They are sitting in a corner of the gallery in the form of an oval, measuring about eight feet by eight feet, and they are illuminated from above. Some of the bottle fragments are the top half of the bottle, others are the bottom half, and all appear to be bobbing on an unstable surface.

Wade
What I've always loved about this piece is there's this sense of are these bottles floating in water? Are they sinking into the ground? And there's a kind of fragility to the ground that they're on. There's something that seems as though it might be moving, the bottles might be slipping into it or just floating on top of it. As you move closer and realize that this is broken shards, broken pieces of glass, there's something a bit violent in it. So that moment where two seeming opposites are meeting each other, of serenity and violence, of sharpness and something that is a somewhat comfortable, familiar object.

Grinshpan
When I looked at the bottles, I was thinking about message in a bottle and how bottles float in the water with a message inside. However, here the message is missing. If we found those bottles laying in the trash, we would see all those bottles and think, "Oh, somebody had a great party." But here she's taking those possibly useless, worthless objects and pouring into them so much meaning.

Wade
Mona Hatoum is very interested in our physical experience of art. Our physical body is how we first encounter any artwork, and then when we stay with an object for a little bit, we start to experience it psychologically. We start to experience it sensually and then intellectually, and might think about what it means to carry objects when one is, say, traveling across the world, what it means to take objects with you, and the kinds of value that we put into everyday objects that we hold.

Grinshpan
Mona's work touches me very deeply, and we work with the same themes, but we approach it in a very different way. Although we come from two different sides of a conflict, we do share many things. Mona was born in Lebanon to a Palestinian family, and now for many years resides in England. I was born in Israel to an ancestor to Holocaust survivors and I live in the United States.

Ramirez
The circumstances of Hatoum's life, her parents exile from Palestine, her birth and upbringing in a country in which she was excluded and then her second exile due to war, speak to the instability, hostility, and mutability of home.

Grinshpan
The combination between the title of the piece and the recognition that the bottles are made of glass is really intriguing because of the fragility and the vulnerability that glass as a material conveys. Also, the fact that glass is an ancient material, it's coming from the Middle East, it makes a really strong connection to the artist and the issues she's attempting to bring to the viewer. The fact that these bottles seem like there is a reference of the artist to the human body, and thinking about these seem like they're floating bodies or drowning bodies is very unsettling.

Ramirez
Hatoum created Drowning Sorrows in 2001, 2002. However, it evokes more recent images of drowned migrants, people who have drowned trying to cross very treacherous bodies of water, be they the Mediterranean Sea, the Rio Grande, or the Suchiate River between Guatemala and Mexico. So when seen in this light, Drowning Sorrows is not just a work about grief or alcohol or alcoholism. It's also a work about migration and about migrant mental health. It's both a memorial to the drowned, the dispossessed and the displaced, and a provocation to the rest of us to treat each other with care.

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