Mona Hatoum: Behind the Seen

The Foundation and Museo Nivola is pleased to present Behind the Seen, a solo exhibition by artist Mona Hatoum, the result of a residency in Orani during which Hatoum explored Sardinia, deepening her encounter with the island’s local culture and artisanal practices.

Curated by Giuliana Altea, Antonella Camarda and Luca Cheri, the exhibition includes both existing works and several new productions, some created in collaboration with local artisans. Behind the Seen reflects on the relationship between body, matter and land, between what is visible and what remains hidden.

Through a language that combines formal minimalism with political tension, Hatoum questions how space is regulated, surveilled and colonised. Her work does not offer solutions, but rather builds environments of experience and suspension, in which viewers are continuously called upon to reposition themselves, to negotiate their perspective and to “see” what remains behind the scenes. In this sense, her works act as critical zones of perception, where the artistic gesture becomes a tool of excavation, deconstruction and unveiling.

The exhibition’s title plays on the double meaning of “seen” and “scene,” suggesting a gaze beyond appearances, toward the hidden spaces of human experience: memory, trauma, identity and the desire for resistance.

Through works that merge formal research with profound political reflection, Behind the Seen challenges the power structures that shape how we see and inhabit the world, revealing what is often concealed behind appearances.

Hatoum’s work revolves around a set of fundamental tensions: inside and outside, visible and invisible, attraction and repulsion, control and vulnerability. From the very beginning, her practice has functioned as a critical device capable of disrupting the supposed neutrality of spaces, objects and forms, showing how every surface can conceal a threshold of ambiguity or a zone of conflict.

The dimension of the body—not only as a physical organism but also as a political and affective entity—is central to her work. Her early performances in the 1980s directly explored the relationship between the female body, urban space and surveillance devices. Later, the body disappears from the stage, replaced by traces, imprints, or symbolic objects of confinement: cages, beds and hospital screens become spatial metaphors of its absence-presence, evoking a vulnerable subjectivity exposed to control.

The theme of control runs through Hatoum’s research by means of minimal structures that incorporate allusive, threatening materials: barbed wire, iron, glass and steel. Domestic objects—beds, chairs, utensils—are destabilised, transformed into instruments of containment or aggression. This unsettled domesticity suggests that dynamics of power, coercion and discipline can permeate even spaces of intimacy.

Her personal experience—born in Beirut to a Palestinian family, unable to return home because of war—informs a poetics of displacement that manifests itself not so much in narrative terms, but in spatial and perceptual ones. Territory is often evoked through fragmented forms, impossible cartographies, or obstructed paths. Twelve Windows (2012–2013) is an emblematic example: created in collaboration with the craftswomen of the Lebanese association Inaash, it presents twelve panels of traditional Palestinian embroidery suspended in space on red washing lines. The installation creates an environment crossed by visual and physical barriers, evoking the themes of diaspora and exiled identity.

This topography of instability also appears in works such as Divide (2025), a hospital screen turned into a dangerous barrier using barbed wire, or Mirror (2025), a grid-like structure devoid of any reflective function, which returns to the viewer not their own image, but the opacity of limitations.

Untitled (red velvet) (1996) presents a fragment of red velvet inscribed with a drawing reminiscent of intestines or lobes of the brain: a recurring motif in the artist’s work, exploring the body’s vulnerability and the fine line between attraction and repulsion.

The large Untitled (bed springs) I (2018) is a lithograph created by placing industrial bed springs directly onto lithographic stone. The result is a negative image, reminiscent of an X-ray, in which the regular grid geometry deforms into a biomorphic composition, suggesting a tension between structure and collapse.

Joining this core of works are new pieces produced for the exhibition during Hatoum’s residency at the Museo Nivola. Among these is the series of ceramic bird cages created with the artisanal workshop Terra Pintada, in which one of Hatoum’s recurring structural motifs returns: the grid as a form of containment, confinement and control. Here, the use of ceramic—a fragile material tied to decorative tradition—introduces a visual and symbolic tension.

Also in ceramic are the forms of Gathering, resembling compressed blocks of earth that recall desolate landscapes, into which the artist has embedded old, rusted nails, like small human figures clustered into fragmentary communities. The elongated shapes and rough surfaces of the nails evoke the postwar sculptures of Giacometti, an artist with whom Hatoum has established a long-distance dialogue in a current exhibition at the Barbican in London.

Shooting Star I and II, with their spiky shapes suspended from the ceiling, appear like exploded geometry. Metallic rays converge in a dense and traumatic core, evoking both a celestial body and a detonating device. Created in collaboration with blacksmith Emanuele Ziranu, the work combines technical precision with visual brutality. The structures radiate force but also instability and their presence in space—hanging, floating, threatening—acts as a point of perceptual tension.

Using traditional technique unique to Sardinia, weaver Mariantonia Urru has crafted a carpet entitled Eye Spy. The apparently random pattern is a translation of a pixelated image from a digital drone recording — an aerial view of a crowd— into a soft, tactile surface.

Wool, a warm and familiar material, paradoxically becomes the vehicle of a cold, detached vision typical of military or urban control technologies. The result is a carpet that does not comfort but disturbs: a visual device disguised as a domestic object, questioning our relationship with privacy, vulnerability and the gaze of power.

Many of the themes that characterise Hatoum’s work converge in the installation that gives the exhibition its title, Behind the Seen, an assemblage of everyday objects arranged in space with apparent casualness but charged with layers of meaning. A bed, a colander bristling with spikes like a nail bomb, a tangle of metal wires, a rickety chair, a stuffed toy overturned under a table and a skinned soccer ball: each element evokes a scene, an interrupted experience. The very title suggests a double register: what is shown and what remains hidden, suppressed, invisible. It is a topography of the domestic unconscious, a fragmented interior that interrogates our relationship with inhabited space, trauma and memory.

Artist’s biography
Mona Hatoum’s poetic and political oeuvre is realised in a diverse and often unconventional range of media, including performance, video, photography, sculpture, installation and works on paper. Her work deals with issues of displacement, marginalisation, exclusion and systems of social and political control. Born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon, Hatoum has lived in London since 1975, after the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War prevented her from returning home. She studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art, London (1975-1979) and the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1979-1981).

Hatoum has participated in numerous international exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005), Istanbul Biennial (1995 and 2011), Documenta, Kassel (2002 and 2017), Biennale of Sydney (2006), Sharjah Biennial (2007 and 2023) and Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013).

Recent solo exhibitions include a major survey organised by Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015) that toured to Tate Modern, London and KIASMA, Helsinki (2016) and a large US survey initiated by the Menil Collection, Houston (2017) that travelled to the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St Louis (2018). 

In September 2022, three solo exhibitions took place simultaneously in three different institutions in Berlin: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Georg Kolbe Museum and KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art. Her most recent extensive solo show was held at KAdE, Amersfoort from January to March 2025. Hatoum’s work was paired with that of Giacometti’s in Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum, at Barbican, London (2025).

Hatoum was awarded the Joan Miró Prize (2011), the 10th Hiroshima Art Prize (2017) and the prestigious Praemium Imperiale (2019) given by the Japan Art Association for her lifetime achievements in the field of sculpture. She was also the recipient of the 2020 Julio González Prize, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern - IVAM, Valencia, Spain.

Mona Hatoum
Behind the Seen
Curated by Giuliana Altea, Antonella Camarda, Luca Cheri
Museo Nivola, Orani (NU)
October 4, 2025–March 2, 2026

Institutional sponsors
Autonomous Region of Sardinia, Municipality of Orani

Main supporter
Fondazione di Sardegna

Special thanks to
White Cube Gallery, London

Catalogue
Allemandi

Local coordination and production assistance
Marco Loi

Artisan workshops
Terrapintada, Bitti; Mariantonia Urru, Samugheo; Emanuele Ziranu, Orani

Exhibition setup
Artigianato e Design by Pietro Fois

Printing
Bioazione by Fabio Milia

Venue
Museo Nivola, Via Gonare 2, 08026 Orani (NU), Italy

Dates
October 4, 2025–March 2, 2026

Opening hours
Monday–Sunday, 10:30am–7:30pm, closed on Wednesdays

Guided tours
Morning: 11:30am, afternoon: 4pm, by reservation for groups of 10 or more, tour cost: 2 EUR in addition to the entrance ticket

Tickets
Full price: 7 EUR, reduced: 5 EUR, accessibility and free entry info: museonivola.it/visita/

Information
Museo Nivola, Via Gonare 2, 08026 Orani (NU), Italy, +39 0784 730063, info@museonivola.it, http://museonivola.it

Press office
Sara Zolla, +39 346 8457982, info@museonivola.it