Suspended from a metal beam in the middle of a subterranean structure, a swing dangled invitingly, waiting to be used. It could only be occupied by one visitor at a time. Descending into this narrow underground cell required attention and might have felt uncomfortable. All the surfaces—stairs, walls, and floor—were made of gabions, wire mesh cages filled with locally sourced stones. Whether for decorative or functional purposes, the gabion containment system was often used to create fences and partitions in private or public spaces, commonly in military and prison environments.
Full Swing allowed visitors to physically experience what it could feel like to exist in conditions of confinement. Dug into the gardens of the Onzelievevrouw psychiatric hospital, it confronted people with a space of tension that formed a dialogue with the surroundings and history of the place. The body became a measure of possibilities as it oscillated between restriction and movement, discomfort and joy, darkness and light, entrapment and freedom.
Both in its material economy and the ideas that underpinned it, the work was a continuation of Mona Hatoum’s long-standing interest in systems of discipline and control, as embodied in the architecture of detention and imprisonment. It merged recurring motifs within the artist's practice that confronted audiences with emotions of instability and displacement, such as the metal grids, swings, and cages seen in the installations Light Sentence (1992) and Suspended (2011).
Mona Hatoum's (b. 1952, Beiroet, LB | UK) work is realised in a diverse range of media; in her large-scale installations she transforms industrial materials such as barbed wire, cement or steel into constructions that feel ordinary yet alienating. Her work aims to elicit both fascination and aversion in equal measure. It reflects on subjects that arise from our current global condition, systems of confinement and control as well as themes of conflict and displacement.