Mona Hatoum
Lebanon/United Kingdom b.1952
Hot Spot 2006
Stainless steel and neon tube
230 x 223 x 223cm
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.