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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.

‘I am delighted to be nominated for The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture and very honoured to have my name associated with that of the great artist. I look forward to exhibiting my work in The Hepworth Wakefield’s beautiful Chipperfield designed gallery.’

Mona Hatoum, Map (clear), 2015. Installation view at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2015 © Mona Hatoum. Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. Photo Florian Kleinefenn
Mona Hatoum, Quarters, 2017. Installation view at Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig © Mona Hatoum. Courtesy the artist and MdbK Leipzig. Photo dotgain.info

Related exhibitions & events

The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture

26 Oct 2018 - 20 Jan 2019

The second Hepworth Prize for Sculpture exhibition presents art work by the shortlisted artists Michael Dean, Mona Hatoum, Phillip Lai, Magali Reus and Cerith Wyn Evans.

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Further Reading

News

Shortlist announced for second The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture

On Thursday 22 March, The Hepworth Wakefield announced the five artists nominated for the second The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture.

More Info