Corps invendu
Unwanted editioned C-type photograph, bought and framed
Year: 1997 or 2023 or 2025
According to Tate, 'Mona Hatoum's work often explores the uncertain boundary between the familiar and the uncanny, and between domestic and hostile environments.'
While trawling eBay, I came across this editioned photograph by Hatoum. I enjoyed the slight, quiet absurdity of a wooden bird and a seagull with just a pane of glass separating them. For an artist with such a serious oeuvre, this was surprisingly amusing, and it instantly appealed. I did the usual 'watch item' and gave it little further thought.
Over the ensuing weeks, months and eventual years, I continued to watch the picture list and relist, then list again and again and again, with not one buyer coming forward to give it a home. What became apparent to me as time passed was that it was becoming more Mona Hatoum the longer it remained in this liminal space of future potential. It was an unwanted photograph for its owner, stuck in a constant cycle of unwantedness within the wider consumerist miasma that is the ocean of second-hand capitalist detritus: eBay.
As time passed, so increased my fascination with its unwitting purgatorial existence. I eventually relented after realising that two years had passed since I had first started 'watching' it. So, in late 2023 or 2025, I sent an offer, which I was quite delighted to have accepted. It transpired that the photograph was a limited edition published by Artists Space, New York in 1997 and sold through the now-closed New York gallery Brooke Alexander. The eBay vendor, based in Port Talbot, Wales, sadly never responded when I asked for any details of its journey into her ownership. RO Frames in Stroud, England, expertly mounted the work in a beech frame, employing bog oak corner splines that echo the wooden bird within the image. The work now hangs in a temporary studio, in limbo once more, but this time it is actually wanted.