"Prayers Must Make Detours" by Olga Grotova & Mona Hatoum

These fields of silence
impenetrable
Prayers must make detours
yet leave traces
like bird’s feet
still anchored in the flesh
Nothing nothing
Breath still knew of love
Death dwells too near
Here the world says:
So be it – Amen –

Nelly Sachs, from Flight and Metamorphosis (1959)

From her escape from Nazi Germany into exile in Sweden, Nelly Sachs shaped poems of survival, fractured yet lucid, carrying the rhythm of endurance. Her verse stands not as ornament but as armature, a structure of breath against silence where Olga Grotova and Mona Hatoum meet, translating trauma into form and turning displacement into a language of matter and voice.

These fields of silence / impenetrable

In her most recent series, Olga Grotova revists the tradition of Eastern European icon painting: layering gesso, soil, and pigment until the surface becomes a sediment of time. Luminosity arises not from depiction but from the slow revelation of layers. Born into a German–Soviet maternal lineage scarred by the Gulag, she treats the wooden panel as both skin and palimpsest, absence not represented but inscribed, the material itself remembering what history sought to obliterate.

Mona Hatoum, exiled from Beirut to London in 1975 at the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war and separated from her mother, channels this fracture into Measures of Distance (1988). Across the moving image of her mother showering in Beirut, their correspondence in Arabic forms a trembling veil, over which Hatoum layers her English translation while her mother’s voice hums distantly in Arabic.

Silence here is not a void but a dense terrain. Both artists inhabit what Giorgio Agamben called ‘the impossibility of bearing witness’: for Grotova, the inherited silence of Soviet and Eastern European women erased from collective memory; for Hatoum, exile itself, the chasm between two voices, two tongues, two homes.

Prayers must make detours / yet leave traces

When speech is forbidden, prayer bends and disguises itself yet persists through its marks. Grotova’s icon-making becomes such a detour, a return to sacred craft that keeps erased histories alive. In Hatoum’s work, Arabic letters, unreadable to most Western viewers, cover the mother’s body, turning intimacy into code.

like bird’s feet / still anchored in the flesh

On Grotova’s panels, pigment is held in tenderness, yet the scratches and gilded fissures bear the memory of impact. Hatoum’s writing performs a similar gesture, tracing what distance has divided. The body, Merleau-Ponty wrote, is where the world takes form; in these works, Hatoum’s film and Grotova’s icons become that body, allowing memory to persist.

Nothing nothing / Breath still knew of love

Against annihilation, a pulse endures. In Grotova’s practice, painting becomes respiration; matter inhales history and exhales memory. Hatoum’s breath carries tenderness across the distance of language and war.

Death dwells too near / Here the world says: So be it – Amen –

The Amen that closes Sachs’s poem is not resignation but recognition. Grotova and Hatoum do not restore faith; they turn Amen into a beginning, a continuous act of remembrance, the quiet art of saying so be it without surrender.