Fossil Folly IV, 2023
Two steel barrels
Commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation for Sharjah Biennial 2023
Long-term loan from a private collection
Mona Hatoum’s Fossil Folly reflects her ongoing exploration of conflict, displacement, and the latent violence embedded in everyday materials. Known for transforming everyday objects into unsettling forms, Hatoum creates immersive installations that shift the viewer’s attention to their own embodied experience. The work, Fossil Folly, consists of two used oil barrels pierced by the silhouettes of desert plants, which appear to emerge like ghostly traces from fossilised matter. This juxtaposition of industrial waste and organic life evokes both ecological fragility and resilience. The barrels, emblematic of global oil economies, are reimagined as sites of transformation where dormant life resurfaces. Through this poetic gesture, Hatoum connects environmental concerns with broader histories of control, extraction, and instability across interconnected geographies. At the same time, the work highlights the ongoing impact of industrial materials, where traces of past economies continue to shape present ecological and political realities.
Fossil Folly brings together two old and beaten steel barrels the surfaces of which have been cut to create the shapes of agave, aloe vera, and thistles. These plant silhouettes appear as spectral presences, suggesting life re-emerging from materials shaped by extraction and industrial use. Mona Hatoum’s work frequently explores themes of exile, borders and systems of control, translating these concepts into spatial experiences that unsettle the viewer. Her work often evokes a sense of precariousness, where the familiar becomes unstable and charged with tension. By transforming everyday objects, she renders the familiar as uncanny and even threatening. Here, the two oil barrels—symbols of global dependency and environmental degradation—are transformed into carriers of fragile, re-emerging life, highlighting the tension between destruction and renewal. The plants, which are both resilient and vulnerable, evoke landscapes marked by scarcity and survival. They also point to the persistence of life beyond human systems of exploitation. Fossil Folly reflects on the interconnected and layered histories of the Mediterranean region and beyond, linking ecological and geopolitical realities and bringing overlooked connections between environment, history and identity to the fore.
Mona Hatoum was born in 1952 in Beirut, Lebanon. She lives and works in London, UK.
