The work of London-based artist Mona Hatoum (b. 1952) illuminates the contradictions and uncertainties of our contemporary global society. Often referencing domestic and everyday objects, Hatoum creates installations and sculptures that capitalize on unexpected combinations to evoke a range of conflicting emotions such as fear and fascination, or attraction and revulsion. Over her four-decade career, she has continually investigated ideas of home and displacement, engaging with conditions of global instability and political upheaval.
Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma, the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United States in twenty years, comprises more than thirty sculptures and installations from American and European collections. Merging the languages of Minimalism and Surrealism, filtered through a feminist lens, Hatoum subverts the familiar to offer nuanced perspectives on universal human questions.
Born to a Palestinian family in Beirut, Hatoum studied at The Byam Shaw and the Slade Schools of Art in London, where she settled at the beginning of the 1975 Civil War in Lebanon. She has had major exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, among other institutions.
