Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum’s art reflects on world conflicts, migrations, and surveillance, using variable materials in order to create spaces of tension, paradox, and ambiguity. The motif of the grid and the sphere serve as metaphors for confinement, oppression, and destruction.

From the point of creation to the placement of the work in the space, Mona Hatoum focuses her attention on the viewer’s body and on the precise moment when he or she encounters the work. Mingling the theme of everyday life with that of global instability, the artist creates a feeling of discomfort. Due to the familiarity of the forms and the poetics of the materials, Mona Hatoum’s works are attractive and irrepressibly lure the eye. Our attention is however disrupted when we approach the work as it reveals harsher and more precarious characteristics than is expected. Consider Remains (chair) V, a piece of furniture reduced to its ghostly charred remains, held together by wire mesh. This chair no longer suggests a refuge or comforting interior, but points to an alarming and disturbing situation.

The desire of the artist to combine geopolitical problematics with esthetical considerations leads to major works such as Concrete Mobile, Orbital II or Hot Spot (stand).

Hot Spot (stand) is a metal globe, wrapped in neon tube emitting a mesmerizing glowing red light. When approaching the work, one feels a sensation of heat and hears an unfamiliar electric buzz. Emblematic of Mona Hatoum’s work, the geographical map is here presented as a statement for a world embroiled in conflict and a territory in flux. For Orbital II, Mona Hatoum uses materials borrowed from the construction industry: the curved steel rebar forms a globe punctuated by clumps of concrete that also look like orbiting planets. Concrete Mobile is composed of the same elements this time suspended overhead. The precarious suspension of the concrete blocks suggests the erosion of a building that was once solid, down to a skeleton of fragments. Mona Hatoum produces a metaphor of a fragile world that is in a permanent state of destruction, while providing the key to a possible reconstruction. A Pile of Bricks also uses building materials. It consists of a pile of bricks that resemble a mobile architectural model and suggests a partially collapsed building with a caved-in façade.

The grid is another theme explored in this exhibition. In a serial approach, Mona Hatoum repeats the motif in drawings on parchment paper entitled Drawing Heat. She produces a freehand drawing with a hot metal rod creating a form by removing material from the surface of the paper.

The body is the starting point for much of the artist’s commentary on the state of the world. However, it may also be the object. Since early days, Mona Hatoum explored the interiority of the body, often revealing its deepest intimacy. With some humor, while still seeking to elicit contradictory emotions, the artist once again uses the sphere in the work entitled Inside Out (concrete), whose surface pattern is reminiscent of the meanderings of the digestive system. In other sculptures, the artist incorporates materials discarded from her own body: a necklace made out of her own fingernails is displayed on a wooden bust (Nail Necklace) and for Silver Ball, rolled hair forms a large ball that is placed on a pedestal like a precious object.

Lastly, SP Atelier extends an invitation to enter a wholly different sort of privacy, that of the artist’s studio. Mona Hatoum displays a set of drawings, photographs, embroideries, and other objects, collected during her residency in São Paulo in 2014. The piece takes us behind the scenes of an artistic practice developing outside any fixed studio location, drawing sustenance from local materials and know-how.

In 2019, Mona Hatoum has been awarded the Praemium Imperiale prize for Sculpture, submitted by Japan Art Association.