Mona Hatoum, of Palestinian origin, was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1952. Following the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, Hatoum settled in Britain in 1975, graduating from Byam Shaw School of Art (1975–79) and the Slade School of Fine Art (1979–81). In her celebrated installations reflecting on conflict, war and feminist issues, domestic objects are often transformed – through the juxtaposition of contradictory materials, changes of scale, or the introduction of uncharacteristic elements – into foreign and potentially threatening things.
Installation and multimedia artist Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1952, into a Palestinian family that fled Haifa (modern day Israel) in 1948. Owing to her father's position at the British Embassy in Beirut, the family had British citizenship. Hatoum recalls that her parents, 'like the majority of Palestinians who became exiles in Lebanon after 1948 ... were never able to obtain Lebanese identity cards ... I grew up in Beirut in a family that had suffered a tremendous loss and existed with a sense of dislocation' (Bomb magazine interview, 1 April 1998), and this, together with concepts of conflict and exile, greatly influenced her future work. Hatoum studied Graphic Design at Beirut University College from 1970–72; visiting Britain briefly in 1975, she became stranded due to the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–2000), and eventually settled permanently in the UK. She attended Byam Shaw School of Art in London between 1975 and 1979 and the Slade School of Fine Art from 1979–81.
Hatoum first came to prominence in the mid-1980s for a series of performance and video works that focused with great intensity on the body. In the 1990s her work moved increasingly towards large-scale installations and sculptures that aimed to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. She has developed a visual language in which banal domestic objects are often transformed – through the juxtaposition of contradictory materials, changes of scale, or the introduction of uncharacteristic elements – into foreign, threatening and potentially dangerous things. In doing so, Hatoum engages the tactile imagination, her sculptures, photographs, and videos incite viewers to imagine their own bodies in relation to these unruly objects. While often referencing political conflicts in works such as her celebrated installation Hot Spot (2006), she does not try to make direct political statements: 'There are issues in my head, but they're in the background; they're not foregrounded in the work, and they're not specific to my own history. In the mature work, I'm thinking about form most of all. I am focusing on the materials, on the aesthetic. In fact, I sometimes spend time trying to remove the content, the better to arrive at abstraction. The tension is between the work's reduced form and the intensity of the possible associations' (Guardian interview, 17 April 2016). In another recent interview she develops this idea further: 'I like my work to offer a physical experience in the first instance and then certain thoughts, maybe about conflict, war or feminist issues can come out of this experience as a sensation that grows on you, almost as an afterthought' (Financial Times, 19 January 2018).
Since she began exhibiting in the 1980s, Hatoum has become one of the most widely exhibited contemporary artists. She had her first solo exhibition at Centre Pompidou in 1994, and at Tate Britain in 2000. She has participated in numerous important group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005), Documenta, Kassel (2002 and 2017), Biennale of Sydney (2006), Istanbul Biennial (1995 and 2011) and Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013). A major recent touring exhibition with over a hundred works by Hatoum from the late 1970s to the present was on display at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2015, and at Tate Modern, London and KIASMA, Helsinki in 2016. Other recent solo displays of her work have taken place at The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas (2017) and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St Louis, Missouri (2018). In 1995, Hatoum was nominated for the Turner Prize. As a winner of the 2011 Joan Miró Prize, Hatoum held a solo exhibition at Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona in 2012. She also exhibited at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, having been awarded the 10th Hiroshima Art Prize in 2017. In 2019, Hatoum was the recipient of the Praemium Imperiale, awarded by the Japanese imperial family, in recognition of her lifetime achievement in sculpture. In 2020, Hatoum received the 2020 Julio González Prize awarded by Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM). She is represented by the White Cube gallery, London, and has studios in Berlin and London. She currently lives and works in London.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Mona Hatoum]
Publications related to [Mona Hatoum] in the Ben Uri Library