Photos by Gail

Mona Hatoum’s Deep Throat (1996) offers an interior view of her  body as an object to be consumed. The artist inventively edited her endoscopy and colonoscopy footage to appear as if we are traveling through her digestive tract, from teeth to anus and back again. “I wanted the work to be about the body probed, invaded, violated, deconstructed,” said Hatoum, who, like all of us, lives in a technologically advanced society, where the loss of personal privacy is widely tolerated.

The work’s title prefers to two major cultural moments from the 1970s in the US: a legendary pornographic movie from 1972, and the code name of a whistleblower during the 1972 — 1974 Watergate scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency. Both phenomena brought to public attention things generally meant to be kept secret or private. Here, a camera hunts through Hatoum’s innermost pathways, served to us on a dinner plate like a delicacy.

Photographed in The Guggenheim Museum in New York City.