Mona Hatoum wins The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture People's Choice

The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture People’s Choice has been awarded to Mona Hatoum. The public have been voting for their favourite shortlisted artist and sharing their thoughts, with Hatoum’s work been described as “visually captivating”, “incredibly moving”, “profound” and “beautiful.”

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

The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture exhibition is on display at The Hepworth Wakefield until 20 January 2019. The exhibition features work by shortlisted artists Michael Dean, Mona Hatoum, Phillip Lai, Magali Reus and prize winner Cerith Wyn Evans.