- Home
- ARTISTS
- Etel Adnan
- Ghada Amer
- Hangama Amiri
- Yto Barrada
- Rana Begum
- Huguette Caland
- Manal Al Dowayan
- Mandy El-Sayegh
- Monir Farmanfarmaian
- Simone Fattal
- Lamya Gargash
- Daniele Genadry
- Zeinab Al Hashermi
- Mona Hatoum
- Susan Hefuna
- Maryam Hoseini
- Helen Khal
- Hayv Kharaman
- Laleh Khorramian
- Tala Madani
- Shaikha Al Mazrou
- Maysha Mohamedi
- Naqsh Collective
- Shirin Neshat
- Monira Al Qadiri
- Farah Al Qasimi
- Alymamah Rashed
- Haleh Redjaian
- Mona Saudi
- Hoda Tawakol
- Helen Zughaib
- About
- News
- Contact
MONA HATOUM
About the Artist
Mona Hatoum (b.1952, Beirut) is a Palestinian artist based in London. Following studies at Beirut University College in the early 1970s, and during a visit to London, she found herself unable to return home due to the outbreak of Lebanon Civil War in 1975. She then continued her studies at Byam Shaw School of Art (1975-79) and the Slade School of Art (1979-81).
Hatoum is known for her ongoing preoccupation with the problematics of Western dominance and colonial legacies, which relates to her own experience as a daughter of Palestinian refugees. Hatoum’s elaborated practice, which spans performance, sculpture, video and installation, can be situated within prominent art movements. Her early performances, in which she used her own body to reflect about timely political issues of displacement, oppression and surveillance correspond to 1970-80s body art and feminist performance art. Her use of grids and geometrical containers draws from minimalism, while her uncanny alternation of furniture and daily objects evokes surrealist imagery. However, much like many other women artists, Hatoum shifts and subverts such traditions rather than locating comfortably within them, thus maintaining her own unique signature.
Hatoum has exhibited widely at prestigious art venues worldwide, including solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2005) and a major survey exhibition organized by Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015), which traveled to Tate Modern, London and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki in 2016. Hatoum has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Sharjah Biennale 15 (2023); Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece (2017); 15th Biennale of Sydney (2006); The Turner Prize, Tate Britain, London (1995) and 46th Venice Biennale (1995). She holds a Honorary Doctorate from the American University of Beirut (2008) and from The University of Southampton, United Kingdom (2010). She is a recipient of the 2011 Joan Miró Prize, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona and the 2018 Art Icon, Whitechapel Gallery, London.
Mona Hatoum. Photo courtesy the artist and White Cube.
WORK IN THE COLLECTION
Mona Hatoum, "+ and -", 1994
Wood, sand, stainless steel and electric motor, with electric plug
Ed 3 of 14
7.5 x 30 x 30cm; stand: 84 x 34 x 34 cm
This work is a re-creation of the kinetic sculpture Self-Erasing Drawing Hatoum made in 1979. Replacing conventional artists’ tools (pencil and paper, paint and canvas) with a motorized, toothed metal arm and a circular bed of sand, Hatoum mechanizes the practices of mark-making and erasure. The sculpture’s hypnotic and continual grooving and smoothing of sand evokes polarities of building and destroying, existence and disappearance, displacement and migration.
In this kinetic work, a rotating motor-driven arm sweeps slowly over the surface of the sandpit, simultaneously creating and erasing circular lines in the sand. It represents the interplay between two opposite forces, making and unmaking, building and destroying in a continuous cycle.
Hatoum’s minimalist object confronts philosophical paradoxes; ‘a paradigm of the inseparable but ambiguous relationship of opposites, an ironic automation of the artist’s volitional act’ Guy Brett in Mona Hatoum, London, 1997, p. 38.