Mona Hatoum

1952 -

London-based Palestinian multimedia artist.

Mona Hatoum (also Muna Hatum) is arguably the best-known female artist of Arab descent living and working in the West. Born in Beirut to Palestinian parents, she left Lebanon in the 1970s, trained at the Byam Shaw and Slade schools of art in London, and has resided there ever since. Widely regarded for her conceptual art, which is primarily executed in performance, video, objects, and installation, Hatoum has worked primarily with the issue of power relationships - especially as they are manifested, manipulated, and subverted in class, gender, and race relationships, and in processes of cultural difference and displacement. Her early works were direct political statements about the body, feminism, and surveillance. Her performances challenged audiences to engage with issues of power and difference. Beginning in the 1990s, her work became more conceptual and subtle, containing implied, complex, and multilayered explorations of these same issues. Her work is increasingly minimalist, and Hatoum is keen to explore the sensuous properties of materials in eliciting contradictory responses - attraction and repulsion, for example, or welcoming and danger - thus creating works that are more complicated than her earlier, more direct, political statements. Although her experience of exile shapes some of her work and she has done pieces critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, she resists interpretations of her art as stemming only from her Middle Eastern background. She insists that her works do not have fixed meanings that relate solely to her background but rather have multiple interpretations that are often paradoxical. Hatoum has exhibited widely in major venues around the world and is the recipient of numerous awards.

Bibliography

Archer, Michael; Brett, Guy; and de Zegher, Catherine. Mona Hatoum. London: Phaidon, 1997.

Dimitrakaki, Angela. "Mona Hatoum: A Shock of a Different Kind." Third Text, 43 (1998): 92 - 95.

Mona Hatoum: The Entire World as a Foreign Land. London: Tate Gallery, 2000.

— JESSICA WINEGAR

Cover of Mona Hatoum (August 1999). Mona Hatoum. Granary Books. ISBN 8881582287. 

Mona Hatoum (born 1952 in Beirut, Lebanon) is a performance artist of Palestinian origin who moved to London in 1975. Trained at both the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Slade School of Art between the years 1975 and 1981. In 1995 she was nominated for the Turner Prize for her exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and for her show at the White Cube.

In the early 1980s Hatoum began her artistic career with performance pieces, though later she moved from 'live' work to more mechanical installations, involving video, light, and sound. While mostly focusing on confrontational themes such as violence, oppression, and voyeurism, she has often made powerful references to the vulnerability and resistance, of our human bodies.

During a visit to London in 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon and she was forced into exile. With this shadow on her shoulders, her early works can be seen as a metaphor for eternal conflict and resistance.

In 1989 Hatoum exhibited her first major scuptural work 'The Light At the End' in the Showroom Gallery. The same piece was shown the following year in the British Art Show. Her Alive and Well was displayed in the Victoria Tunnel (a former airraid shelter under the streets of Newcastle-upon-Tyne) in 1990.

She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1995. In 1997, one of Hatoum's works which had been purchased by Charles Saatchi was included in the Sensation exhibition which toured London, Berlin and New York.

In 2000, her work The Entire World as a Foreign Land was at the inaugural launch of the Tate Britain. She had a work called Home at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in 2004.

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