Mona Hatoum (منى حاطوم)

Of Palestinian origins, Mona Hatoum was born in Lebanon and has been based in the United Kingdom since 1975. Hatoum has found inspiration in her experience of displacement by conflict. Movement, travel, discovering new cultures, people and lands are at the core of her practice, which addresses the ‘rootlessness’ of a nomadic life. In the 1980s, her first works—videos and performances—focused on her own body as a means of making political statements about dislocation and migration, such as in Measures of Distance. In the 1990s, she moved towards the creation of large-scale site-specific installations and objects. Hatoum’s oeuvre incorporates a variety of media, from metal, light and glass to bodily material such as hair and everyday objects. Engaging with diverse issues, ranging from politics and gender to domesticity and our relationship to space, her works elicit multiple interpretations and emotions, depending on the physical and mental interaction of the viewer with the artwork. Her imposing sculptures and installations destabilize the perception of reality and highlight the conflicting relationships between desire and revulsion, fear and fascination, such as Slicer (1999), Paravent (2008), and Daybed (2008)— everyday utensils and furniture blown up out of proportion, becoming uncanny and threatening. Other works — such as The Light at the End (1989), Current Disturbance (1996), Cage-à-deux (2002), and Impenetrable (2009)— extend the exploration of such anxiety, by posing questions about the nature of shared and social space, and investigating notions of freedom and captivity.