Mona Hatoum

Beirut, Lebanon, 1952 -

BiographyHatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon in 1952 and now lives and works in London and BerlinMona Hatoum's poetic and political oeuvre is realised in a diverse and often unconventional range of media, including installations, sculpture, video, photography and works on paper. In her work she has determinedly explored a sense of the malaise and unsettledness that permeates our contemporary world.This experience of living 'elsewhere', outside her home country, has sensitized Hatoum to the themes of power and identity, which can be seen through her entire oeuvre. In her sculptures, video works and large-scale installations she repeatedly addresses the violence inherent in institutional power structures and, by contrast, the isolation and vulnerability of the individual. Her central point of reference is often the body, sometimes her own body that she employs in her early performance pieces and later video works. Since the beginning of the '90s her work moved increasingly towards large-scale installation works that aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. Hatoum has developed a language in which familiar, domestic everyday objects like chairs, beds, cots and kitchen utensils are transformed into foreign, threatening and dangerous objects.Hatoum's works are analogous to human existence - vividly formulated but at the same time complex and mysterious. As she puts it: "You first experience an artwork physically. I like the work to operate on both sensual and intellectual levels. Meanings, connotations and associations come after the initial physical experience as your imagination, intellect, psyche are fired off by what you've seen."Hatoum's work has been exhibited widely in Europe, the United States and Canada. In 1997 a survey of her work was organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and toured to The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, MoMA, Oxford and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (1998). Hatoum's exhibition 'The Entire World as a Foreign Land' was the inaugural exhibition for the launch of Tate Britain, London in 2000. Other solo exhibitions include Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 1994, Castello di Rivoli, Turin (1999), 'Domestic Disturbance', Site Santa Fe and Mass MoCA (2000-2001), and a survey of her work at the Centro de Arte de Salamanca and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Spain (2002-03). Hatoum is currently artist in residence on the DAAD program in Berlin (Berliner Kunstlerprogramm, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst). Mona Hatoum is the 2004 winner of the prestigious Sonning Prize awarded every two years by the University of Copenhagen. From e-flux, 3/30/04

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