Corps étranger, a work produced by Mona Hatoum in 1994, offers an intrusion into the utmost privacy of the artist's body: a video, shot with an endoscopic camera, alternately explores the surface and the interior of her body. The video is projected in a circle on the floor of a cylindrical structure which the viewer enters through one of the two narrow doors situated on either side of it, while a soundtrack, broadcasting heartbeats as they can be heard from different parts of the body being examined by the camera, accompanies the video image. So for some ten minutes the camera, favouring back-and-forth movements, travels swiftly round the outlines of the artist's body, venturing turn by turn into its various orifices. 

Mona Hatoum, who is conscious during the medical examination, took part in the making of the video, revealing to onlookers the most remote parts of her body, those which, in principle, only the medical eye – that organ of inspection – has access to. This, first and foremost, is the meaning of the work's title, which designates the camera, as an extension of the scientific eye, as an external element penetrating the patient's body, appropriating it and then retrieving deconstructed images of it. To such a point that the examined body, which is nevertheless familiar, also becomes “foreign”, as if unrecognizable, to the person to whom it belongs – not counting the fact that medical imagery is at times the revealer of an anomaly which the subject has no inkling of, further bolstering the feeling of alienation of the latter in relation to his or her own body. Lastly, the term “foreign body” refers to the onlooker's position within the installation's arrangement. In fact, the onlooker who becomes involved in the structure enclosing the endoscopic video enters into an unknown body which he, or she, is invited to probe through images whose proportions go beyond the real scale, thus magnifying the effect of immersion in a different territory, here delimited by the circular architecture. Whether the onlooker walks round the image by moving about on the inner periphery of the structure encircling the video, or whether he obliquely crosses the projection surface, he cannot avoid the confrontation with the body revealed in its biological aspects: the intestines, a part which the artist uses as a motif in her sculptures Pedestal of the World (1991-1993) and Entrails Carpet (1995), is one of the many elements that enables the onlooker to discover, in its organic dimension, all through this anatomical journey. 

The type of structure devised by the artist to accommodate the endoscopic video is such that it, to some extent, conditions the viewer's reception of the work: the relatively closed structure of the cylinder – just two narrow doors afford entry to it – suggests a private space, with reserved access. This feeling is reinforced by the almost total darkness of the surroundings (the video images are the sole light source for the installation). Then, once the door is passed through, the extremely intimate nature of the images projected confirms the feeling aroused by the structure, inevitably inflicting upon the onlooker a status of voyeur. Going still further than the idea of voyeurism, Corps étranger refers to the notion of surveillance and the principle of correlation between eye and power, considerably developed by Foucault. The encounter within the architectural space, between the artist's body and the onlooker's gaze standing in for the medical eye, actually works like a spatialization of the power wielded, within the medical institution, by the scientific eye over the patient's vulnerable body.

Frédérique Baumgartner

Translated by Simon Pleasance