Mona Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon in 1952 and has lived in London since 1975 after finding herself stranded there on the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War.

Hatoum began her career in London in the early 1980s making performances that touched on social and political issues. Using herself as both subject and tool, she located the body as a battleground: the fulcrum of political, social and gender conflict.

This picture comes from a performance that Hatoum made in Brixton, South London in 1985, where she walked barefoot through the streets, dragging a pair of large boots attached to her ankles by their laces. Brixton is an area of London that previously had witnessed violent race riots, therefore police presence was very prominent in the area. The boots that Hatoum chose to use were very particular: ‘Dr. Martens’, which have been traditionally worn by the British police, but were also adopted, at the time, by the skinhead movement that is commonly associated, with racist violence. Hatoum's movement was encumbered by the boots of the ‘state’ that followed her vulnerable steps like a continual, threatening presence or heavy shadow. (Mona Hatoum's Studio, 2024)

Wolfgang Kos (EVN Art advisary board) decribes the work as following: 

The intimate and the political – Mona Hatoum’s work continuously reminds one that between these two poles there are minefields. In 1975 the Palestinian artist, who grew up in Beirut, immigrated to London. In the 80’s, she drew attention to herself with her feminist and politically explosive performances in which she acted out violence and oppression through the medium of personal body rituals:  a covered face into which a knife cuts, a woman in a tight plastic box who attempts to find a hold in slippery clay; a bloody body on a torture table with the head bandaged.

The picture with naked feet pulling heavy boots comes from a 60 minute performance in the south London area of Brixton in which a particularly large number of immigrants live. The boots are “Doc Martens”, such as those often worn by policemen and skinheads, which means that they represent power just as much as they represent the blind fury of violence. Naturally, the polemical image can also be read as a feminist metaphor – boots as a symbol of machismo.

Wolfgang Kos, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)