Mona Hatoum
![Mona Hatoum / Lebanon/England b.1952 / Hot Spot (detail) 2006 / Stainless steel and neon tube / 230 x 223 x 223cm / The David and Indrė Roberts Collection / © Mona Hatoum / Courtesy: Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin | Paris / Photograph: Jörg von Bruchhausen](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/m2obzhc2/production/0e0fd50b960b1847a3c877a966918211ce80b6bb-4000x2653.jpg?rect=0,346,4000,1963&w=320&h=157&q=90&fit=crop)
Mona Hatoum / Lebanon/England b.1952 / Hot Spot (detail) 2006 / Stainless steel and neon tube / 230 x 223 x 223cm / The David and Indrė Roberts Collection / © Mona Hatoum / Courtesy: Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin | Paris / Photograph: Jörg von Bruchhausen / View full image
Mona Hatoum
Lebanon / United Kingdom b.1952
Hot Spot 2006
Stainless steel and neon tube
The David and Indrė Roberts Collection
Courtesy: The Roberts Institute of Art, London
Mona Hatoum depicts the continents in startling red neon, casting viewers in an emergency-red glow. Hot Spot 2006 is at once an energy system, a map and a model. The work also suggests a cage, of a scale sufficient to imagine ourselves locked inside.
‘Hot spots’ are often understood as distant conflict zones that are seen as ‘other’ or isolated. By extending a sense of heat across the entire globe, Hatoum complicates this sense of distance, suggesting that geopolitical conflict affects us all. Hatoum proposes our whole planet is a hot spot, constantly redefined by the struggle for power: whether through war, disease, social unrest or structural inequity. Hatoum seeks to bring the experiences of those suffering or living without freedom into the gallery, creating a space of shared social consciousness.
Throughout human history, globes have symbolised travel, freedom and discovery but Hot Spot conveys a world that is wired, dangerous and overheating. With global warming affecting every region on Earth, today the work assumes a new environmental urgency as a sizzling omen of change to come.