Though her work rarely refers to them explicitly, the historical events that have shaped Hatoum's life almost always frame introductions to and interpretations of her work. Hatoum identifies a crucial impasse for feminism, but contrary to the artist's statements, I argue that because of her commitment to representing the trauma of exile, her work productively grapples with the very problem she points to and offers opportunities to re-imagine and recognize feminism's various and expanding forms. I write unintentionally because Hatoum has stated that in her early work feminism was a tool for 'investigating power structures on a wider level as in the relationship between the Third World and the West,' but found that 'the issues and discussions within western feminism were not necessarily relevant to women from less privileged parts of the world' and so her work, she claims, does not deal with feminism or feminist theory. Furthermore, Hatoum's scrupulous investigation of exile's multiple inscriptions of absence has developed-unintentionally, it seems-into a critique of western feminism's imaginary relation to women living in oppressive political circumstances.

Rutas engages with what Gayatri Spivak describes as the 'worlding of a world,' a formulation that describes the imperialist project of imposing maps of hierarchy and possession on to 'what was assumed to be uninscribed,' as well as 'texting, textualising, a making of art, a making into an object to be understood.' An artist of exile whose body of work has been irrevocably marked by the Middle East's 'pathological geograph of power,' Hatoum's work links and distinguishes the making involved in power's shaping of space and visual art's potential for marking oppression, resistance, and absence into visibility. Another example of Hatoum's propensity to construct images that enact and question cultural productions of space, Rutas' netted pattern of distorted geometric shapes fragment already-existing maps into defamiliarized parts, suggesting the possibility of inscribing new, imaginary cartographies upon and within those already established. In a recent piece entitled Rutas ( Routes, 2002) Mona Hatoum photocopied maps from airline brochures and colored in the spaces between the thread-thin lines that represent flight routes.

Seeing Feminism in Exile: The Imaginary Maps of Mona Hatoum

Imaginary Maps by Jennifer K. Heath