Mona Hatoum

1952 born in Beirut, Lebanon and lives in London, UK.

Mona Hatoum studied at Beirut University College (1970-72) and settled in London in 1975, attending the Byam Shaw School of Art (1975-79) and the Slade School of Art (1979-81).

Mona's poetic and political oeuvre is realised in a diverse and often unconventional range of media, including installation, sculpture, video, photography and works on paper.

Mona first became widely known 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 aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. She has developed a language in which familiar, domestic everyday objects are often transformed into foreign, threatening and dangerous things. Even the human body is rendered unfamiliar in Corps étranger (1994), a video installation that displays an endoscopic journey through the interior landscape of her own body. Homebound (2000) is an assemblage of household furniture wired up with an audibly active electric current that combines a sense of threat with a surrealist sense of humour. In Hot Spot (2006) and Map (clear) (2015) Mona uses cartography to explore instability and precariousness in today’s political landscape.

Since 1983 Mona's work has been exhibited in public institutions around the world including solo exhibitions at 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), Parasol Unit, London (2008), Darat Al Funun, Jordan (2008) and Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2009).

Mona has held teaching positions in London, Maastricht, Cardiff, and at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Public collections of her work include the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tate Gallery, London; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; and Kunsthaus, Zurich. Recent solo exhibitions include Bourj at Alexander and Bonin, New York (2011), Bunker at White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London (2011), and Witness at the Beirut Art Center (2010).

Mona is represented by White Cube, London.

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