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pp.85-104
Mona Hatoum and community make unlikely bedfellows. From her beginnings as a teenage exile to her maturity as an internationally celebrated artistic nomad, Hatoum defies classification within any single geographical or cultural community. Attempting, however, to locate specific points of contact between her and certain communities in terms of artist‐in‐residence projects in which she participated might be a particularly fruitful way of circumventing her notorious critical resistance to identity and her refusal of homogeneity. This paper starts with Miwon Kwon’s critique of contemporary practices in community‐based art, which locate an essentialising force that isolates a single point of commonality and overlooks authentic differences. It then turns to Jean‐Luc Nancy’s reconceptualization of community as ‘unworked’ and ‘being‐in‐common’ to provide analytical tools for avoiding the dangers of essentialism. By examining the three residencies that Hatoum accepted in the mid‐1990s in the light of Nancy’s observations and theories, and by bringing the idea of artistic nomadism and that of community into juxtaposition, we hope to show that Hatoum succeeds in finding an equilibrium between art and community, and that this sheds new light on the issues raised in recent discussions on such relationship
