It operates through the juxtaposition of two strands of ambiguously contrasting image and sound. She has said: 'I want to remind the audience that there are different realities that people have to live through … Changing Parts … is about such different realities - the big contrast between a priviledged space, like the West, and the Third World where there's death, destruction, hunger.' (Quoted in Mona Hatoum, 1997, p.127.)
In this video, the artist tries to overcome the effects of distance, and reflects on geography represented in exile due to war, and on the psychological distance represented in each one’s approach to her womanhood. The video beautifully weaves personal images and audio recordings of a very intimate nature, binding the personal with the political. Reading aloud from letters sent by her mother in Beirut, Hatoum creates a visual montage reflecting her feelings of separation and isolation from her Palestinian family. The personal and political are inextricably bound in a narrative that explores personal and family identity against a backdrop of traumatic social rupture, exile and displacement.
The video So Much I Want to Say consists of a series of still images, changing every eight seconds, which show the artist's face in close-up with a pair of male hands gagging her mouth and preventing her from speaking. Meanwhile her voice on the sound-track repeats over and over the words of the title.
Big Fat Slenderella looks at dieting from the fat person's point of view. In this work, excerpts from documentary interviews with fat people are juxtaposed with fat animals in captivity by the inventive use of wipe effects. Commercials for products like The Poodle Diet Recipe Collection satirize the mainstream obsession with dieting and their fear of gaining weight. Despite the conventional wisdom dished out by medical practitioners, studies have shown that dieting simply does not work for 95% of the population. Why are we still encouraged to diet? Could it be profits and the fact that if someone is dieting, that's all they have energy for? The fat experts in Slenderella are all fat themselves, and tell stories of the many diets and medically administered amphetamine "cures" they have tried over the years.
