Artist

Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum is a Palestinian born 1952, Beirut, Lebanon who has been living and working in Britain since 1975.
Mona 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.

Hatoum started her career making visceral video and performance work in the 1980s that focused with great intensity on the body. Since the beginning of the 1990s, her work moved increasingly towards large-scale installations that aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. In her singular sculptures, Hatoum has transformed familiar, every-day, domestic objects such as chairs, cots and kitchen utensils into things foreign, threatening and dangerous. Even the human body is rendered strange in works such as 'Corps étranger' (1994) or ‘Deep Throat’ (1996), installations that use endoscopic journeys through the interior landscape of the artist’s own body. In Homebound (2000) and Sous Tension (1999) Hatoum uses an assemblage of household furniture wired up with an audibly active electric current – combine a sense of threat with a surrealist sense of humour to create works that draw the viewer in on both an emotive and intellectual level. In smaller sculptures such as Traffic (2004) and Twins (2006) Hatoum uses found materials, rich with patina and laden with personal resonance, to create poetic, beguiling works on an intimate scale.

Mona Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon in 1952 and now lives and works in London and Berlin. She has participated in numerous important group exhibitions including The Turner Prize (1995), Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005), Documenta XI, Kassel, 2002, Biennale of Sydney (2006), the Istanbul Biennial (1995 and 2011) and The Fifth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013).
Solo exhibitions include Centre Pompidou, Paris (1994), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1997), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1998), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (1999), Tate Britain, London (2000), Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Magasin 3, Stockholm (2004) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2005). Recent exhibitions include Measures of Entanglement, UCCA, Beijing (2009), Interior Landscape, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2009), Witness, Beirut Art Center, Beirut (2010), Le Grand Monde, Fundaciòn Marcelino Botìn, Santander (2010) and as the winner of the 2011 Joan Miró Prize, she held a solo exhibition at Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona in 2012. In 2013-2014 she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum St Gallen and the largest survey of her work to be shown in the Arab world is currently held at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha.

Artist Code: 177

Videography

Eyes Skinned

1988, 04:04 minutes, colour, Eng./Arabic

Measures of Distance

1988, 15:25 minutes, colour, English

Changing Parts

1985, 24:00 minutes, B&W, English

so much I want to say

1983, 06:00 minutes, B&W, English

Critical Writing

Exiled at Home
by Amin Alsaden. Toronto: Vtape, 2022.
Curatorial Incubator v. 14: All is Well On the Border
by Lisa Steele. Toronto: Vtape, 2017.
A Past Not Yet Passed: Postmemory in the Work of Mona Hatoum
by Chrisoula Lionis. Social Text, Summer 2014, v. 32, no. 2.
Once More With Feeling: Postmemory in the Work of Mona Hatoum
by Catherine Fowler. Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), 2013, v. 2, no. 1.
7th Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art
by Francis Frascina. Art Monthly, Nov 2012, no. 361.
Closer
by Jim Quilty. Art Review, Apr. 2009, no. 31.
Video Art, A Guided Tour by Catherine Elwes (Books)
by Tom Sherman. Border Crossings, Aug. 2005, v. 24, no. 3.
Somewhere Elsewhere: Diasporic Visions of Space and Subject
by Laura J. Kuo. Fuse, Feb. 2005, v. 28, no. 1.
FFWD, RWD, and PLAY: Performance Art, Video, and Reflections on...
by Tagny Duff. Caught in the Act: anthology of performance art by Canadian women, 2004. Toronto: YYZ, 2004.
What Is That and between Arab Women and Video?: The Case of Beirut
by Laura U. Marks. Camera Obscura, 2003, v. 18, no. 3.
Video Haptics and Erotics
by Laura U. Marks. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, 2002. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
To Touch the Other:: A story of Corpo-electrontic Surfaces
by Christine Ross. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, 2002. New York: Routledge press, 2002.
Video Inn and the CRTC
by N/A N/A. In Vision, 2001.
From Nest to Nest, Creating on the Fly
by Ann Wilson Lloyd. The New York Times, June 3, 2001.
The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses
by Laura U. Marks. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000.
Images fest has a thing for sex
by Cameron Bailey. Now, Apr. 22, 1999, v. 18, no. 34.
Vtape: FAQ & info
by Lissa Gibbs. The Independent, July 1999.
Vtape: FAQ & info
Crossings/Traversees, 1998. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1998.
Mona Hatoum's world-wise forms
by Blake Gopnik. The Globe and Mail, Aug. 23 Summer, 1997.
UNB Art Centre Exhibit Tells Stories on Videotape
by Unknown. The Daily Gleaner, Oct. 15, 1994.
Perspectives Of the Body In Canadian Video Art
by Dot Tuer. C Magazine, Winter 1993, no. 36.
Video and Orality
by Peggy Gale. Canadian Art, Summer 1993, v. 10, no. 2.
Desiring Daughters
by Renee Baert. Screen, Summer 1993, v. 34, no. 2.
Artist Profile: Mona Hatoum
by Mona Hatoum. Matriart, Spring 1990, v. 1, no. 1.
Culture Without a Country
by Ammiel Alcalay. Afterimage, May 1990, v. 17, no. 10.
Images '89
by Donna Lypchuk. Cinema Canada, Sept. 1989.
Cinema Canada: Festivals
by *Not Documented. Cinema Canada, Sept. 1989.
Uprising: Videotapes on the Palestinian Resistance
by Elia Suleiman and Dan Walwroth. Uprising, 1989.
Dreams, Memories, Realities: Recent Black Video and Television...
by Karen Alexander and Ben Gibson. 1988 American Film Institute Video Festival, 1988.
Collision In The Capital: Politics and Art Hit head-On in Video...
by Geoff Pevere. Fuse, Summer 1985, v. 9, no. 1 & 2.
Hostile Realities
by P.D Burwell. High Performance, 1985, v. 8, no. 30.