One of Mona Hatoum’s best-known works, Measures of Distance is composed of still images of the artist’s mother in the shower, covered by the Arabic text (read aloud in English) of her letters to her daughter. Hatoum has said this work “spoke of the complexities of exile, displacement, the sense of loss and separation caused by war. In other words, it contextualized the image, or this person, ‘my mother,’ within a social-political context.” The layered elements of image, text, and voiceover also create a dual narrative of an emotional relationship between mother and daughter and their experiences of exile. Hatoum was born in Beirut to a Palestinian family, following their displacement from Haifa in the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. In 1975, Hatoum found herself stranded in London for several years due to the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, and was unable to return to her family, as revealed in this video.

• Komaroff, Linda, Stephanie Rouinfar, Sandra Williams, and Sarah Mostafa Ahmed. Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2023. https://archive.org/details/women-defining-women (accessed January 12, 2024).

• Komaroff, Linda. Islamic Art Now: Contemporary Art of the Middle East. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015.

  View this publication in LACMA's Reading Room
  

• Komaroff, Linda. "Islamic Art Now and Then." In Islamic Art: Past, Present, Future, edited by Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, 26-56. New Haven, New York, and London: Yale University Press, 2019.