Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut in 1952 to a Palestinian family that, like most Palestinians exiled to Lebanon after 1948, was never able to obtain Lebanese citizenship. In 1975, on what was meant to be a brief visit to London, civil war broke out in Lebanon and she was stranded; she stayed, studying at the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Slade. Through the 1980s she made visceral performance and video work centred on the body, before turning to installation and sculpture — everyday objects such as cots, chairs, and kitchen utensils scaled up, caged, or wired with electric current until the familiar becomes threatening.

Exile and dislocation run quietly through the work. In the video Measures of Distance (1988), her mother’s letters from Beirut are read over photographs of her in the family shower, intimacy and separation held in one frame. Hatoum was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1995, and a major survey of her work opened at the Centre Pompidou in 2015 before travelling to Tate Modern in 2016 — her first major survey in Britain. Among her honours are the Joan Miró Prize (2011), the Hiroshima Art Prize (2017), and the Praemium Imperiale (2019). She lives and works in London.

Selected works

• Measures of Distance (1988)
• Light Sentence (1992)
• Corps étranger (1994)
• Homebound (2000)

Sources

• Mona Hatoum — Tate
• Who is Mona Hatoum? — Tate
• Mona Hatoum — White Cube