Mona Hatoum

Born in Beirut to a Palestinian family and now living in London, Mona Hatoum is familiar with changing definitions and perceptions of borders, both national and
cultural. In this piece she manipulates cotton rag pulp into a handmade paper depicting the Gall-Peters projection of the world, a presentation that, in contrast to maps drawn from a Eurocentric perspective, shows the world’s land masses in true proportion to the areas they occupy.

Hatoum’s use of cotton fiber here is particularly apt, given the material’s global history of cultivation and trade. Grown in the Indus Valley (present-day Pakistan),
Egypt, and the Americas for thousands of years, cotton was virtually unknown in Europe until 800 CE, when it was introduced by Arab traders.