Mona Hatoum (1952) is a Palestinian, Beirut-born artist, living in UK. She started her artistic career with performance and video art, focused on bodily themes, and has later added photography, installation art, sculpture and other genres to her body of work. Hatoum also often uses light as her material.
Hatoum’s work is conceptually political. Using different and surprising materials, she comments on issues of gender, race, and conflict. She often uses familiar, even cosy objects and shapes, and makes them eerie by changes in size, colour, texture, light or context.
The discussed artwork was Light Sentence, where a single bulb moves slowly but randomly, surrounded by a wall of small cages, making shadows on the surrounding walls swell, move and shrink. The way Hatoum uses light in a simple but eloquent was much appreciated.
EDUCATION
1979–81 Slade School of Fine Art, London
1975–79 Byam Shaw School of Art, London
1970–72 Beirut University College, Lebanon
LATEST SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2006
Over, Under and In Between, Fondazione Prada, Milan
2025
Behind the Seen, Nivola Museum, Orani, Italy
Encounters: Giacometti, Barbican, London, White Cube, Seoul
Hot Spot, Turner Contemporary, Margate
Inside Out, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands
2024
Eyes Skinned and So much I want to say, VISUAL Carlow, Ireland
2023
Taking a stand: Käthe Kollwitz with interventions by Mona Hatoum, Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany, 2024
Sculpture 21st: Mona Hatoum, Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg
Early Works, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
2022
all of a quiver, KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin
Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin
Performance Documents, 1980-1987/2013, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
+ and -, Winsing Art Place, Taipei
So Much I Want To Say, Accelerator, Stockholm
Revisit, Magasin III, Stockholm
2021
Valencia Institute of Modern Art, Spain