For the Bruges Triennial, Mona Hatoum presents a new installation titled Full Swing at the garden of the Onzelievevrouw psychiatric hospital. The work invites visitors to swing in a narrow underground passage.

In the middle of the structure, a swing dangles invitingly from a metal beam. Full Swing makes you feel what it’s like to be trapped. It confronts the audience with sensations of instability and displacement. The body becomes a measure of possibilities, suspended in a space replete with tension, oscillating between restriction and movement, discomfort and joy, darkness and light, imprisonment and freedom.

The work is an extension of Mona Hatoum’s long-standing interest in systems of discipline and control, as represented in the architecture of detention and imprisonment.

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