Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon in 1952 and has lived in London since 1975.

Mona Hatoum engages with the contradictions of life. Her work often achieves a sense of the ‘uncanny’, that visceral jolt we experience when we encounter a familiar object in an unfamiliar context. Early performance and video-based work gave way in the 1990s to sculpture and installations, but throughout she has retained an interest in the body – its fragility and resilience – and with ideas of displacement and confinement. Haltom’s major survey exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2015); Tate Modern, London (2016) and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2016) drew on thirty-five years of radical thinking combining these political and aesthetic concerns.

Hatoum is acutely sensitive to the specificity of place and fascinated by the materials and craft skills of the many countries she has visited and worked in. Over the years, residencies have taken the artist from the heightened political atmosphere of Jerusalem to the domesticity of the last Shaker community in Maine. Yet what is striking in Hatoum’s work is how personal experience is always made universal.

She has participated in numerous important group exhibitions including the Turner Prize (1995), Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005), Documenta, Kassel (2002 and 2017), Biennale of Sydney (2006), the Istanbul Biennial (1995 and 2011) and The Fifth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013).

In January 2018, Hatoum received the Whitechapel Art Icon Award.