Mona Hatoum

In January of 2020, Hatoum was part of Artpace’s exhibit titled Visibilities: Intrepid Women of Artpace.

In March 2018, Hatoum was shortlisted for the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, alongside Michael Dean, Phillip Lai, Magali Reus and Cerith Wyn Evans. The work of the shortlisted artists was displayed at the Hepworth Wakefield gallery from the end of October of that year.

The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas organized a solo exhibition titled "Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma" that was on view from October 12, 2017 to February 25, 2018. This exhibition then traveled to the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and was on view from April 6 to August 11, 2018.

2017 The 10th Hiroshima Art Prize, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art

2017 Terra Infirma, Menil Collection, Houston, Texas

2017 Terra Infirma, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri, 2018

2017 Displacements/Entortungen: Ayşe Erkmen & Mona Hatoum, Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany

In May 2016, Tate Modern held a "comprehensive exploration into 35 years of Hatoum's work in Britain, from her early performance and video works to her sculpture and large-scale installation"

2016 Twelve Windows, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, 2016

Hatoum's work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2015.

2015 Twelve Windows, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas

2015 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts

The elements of the video—the letters, Hatoum's mother's wish to see her, and mentions of the war by Hatoum's mother—explore how the war in Palestine and the war in Lebanon displaced the identity and the relationships of Hatoum and her family. The video is neither a documentary nor meant to be journalistic. The video critiques stereotypes and remains optimistic, since the narration from the letters is largely positive, except about the distance between the mother and the daughter. Hatoum attempts to recreate the moments when she reunited with her mother in Beirut and when she asked to photograph her in the shower. Instead of directly depicting the Israeli–Palestinian conflict or the Lebanese Civil War, Hatoum shows how the conflicts affected her family's relationships and her identity. Hatoum both distances and draws in Western audiences through her narration in English and Arabic.

Many of Hatoum's early pieces situate the body as the locus of a network of concerns—political, feminist, and linguistic—thereby eliciting a highly visceral response. One of her pieces, a 1994 video installation called Corps etranger, showed color video images of an endoscopic probe of her body.

2014 Turbulence, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar

2014 Twelve Windows, Alexander and Bonin, New York

2014 Close Quarters, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Belgium

2013 Mappings, Centre d’art des Pénitents Noirs, Aubagne, France

2013 A Body of Work, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy

2012 Projection, Joan Miró Prize, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

2011 Silver Lining, Hochschule der Künste, Bern, Switzerland

2010 Suspendu, MAC/VAL Musée d’art contemporain du Val–de–Marne, Vitry–sur–Seine, France

2010 Käthe – Kollwitz Prize 2010, Akademie der Künste, Berlin

2010 Electrified, Kunsthal 44 Møen, Askeby, Sweden

2010 Le Grand Monde, Fundación Botín, Santander, Spain

2010 Keeping It Real: Act 3, Current Disturbance, Whitechapel Gallery, London

Hot Spot III, created in 2009, is a large installation piece of the globe tilted like the Earth and about as tall as a person. The title connects to the theme of political unrest, imagining conflict in one geographical area upsetting the whole world. The globe is made of cage-like steel that glows luminescent red, as though the world is ablaze, flickering quickly, meant to create an energetic environment that mesmerizes the audience. The installation also invokes a feeling of danger with the hot red lighting outlining the continents. Hatoum challenges whether minimalist or surrealist forms can adequately address the world's issues.

2009 Measures of Entanglement, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

2009 Interior Landscape, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice

2009 Undercurrent (red), Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy

2009 Mona Hatoum: Collected Works, Rennie Collection at Wing Sang, Vancouver

2008 Undercurrents, XIII Biennale Donna, Palazzo Massari PAC, Ferrara, Italy

2008 Darat al Funun – The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman, Jordan

2005 Over My Dead Body, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney

2005 Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon

2004 Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Magasin III, Stockholm

2003 Photo and Video Works, Uppsala Konstmuseum, Sweden

2003 Artist’s Choice: Mona Hatoum, Here Is Elsewhere, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Made in 2002, Grater Divide transforms an everyday object, in this case a common kitchen grater, into a 80 in × 76 in × 33 in (203 cm × 193 cm × 84 cm) divider, alluding to political alienation, perhaps caused by Israeli-built walls in Palestinian territory.

2002 Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

2000 The Entire World as a Foreign Land, Tate Britain, London

2000 SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico; as Domestic Disturbance, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, 2001

1999 Le Creux de l’enfer – Centre d’art contemporain, Thiers, France; Le Collège, FRAC

1999 Fonds régional d’art contemporain Champagne–Ardenne, Reims, France, 2000;

1999 Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium, 2000

1998 Measures of Distance, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio

1998 Over My Dead Body, Der Standard, Museum in Progress, Vienna

1998 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Hatoum has tied her works to other political movements, especially black struggle. In an interview with Michael Archer in 1997, Hatoum said: "At the beginning it was important to think about the black struggle as a total political struggle. There are common political forces and attitudes that discriminate against people. In the same way as feminism started off with this totalizing concept of 'sisterhood', and then we ended up with many feminisms, if you like. The black struggle became more diversified once the basic issues were established. And blackness here is not to do with the colour of your skin but a political stance."

1996 Current Disturbance, Capp Street Project, San Francisco

She has also participated in a number of recognized group exhibitions, including: The Turner Prize (1995), Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005), Biennale of Sydney (2006) and the Biennale of Montreal; Drone the automated image (2013). A solo exhibition entitled Turbulence is organized in 2014 by Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha.

Some of her other solo exhibitions of note include: 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), Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2009), Beirut Art Center (2010), and the Menil Collection (2017).

1994 Mona Hatoum, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

A notable piece exemplifying her turn from performance to physical objects is Keffieh (1993–1999), a scarf woven of human hair that juxtaposes ideas of femininity and religion.

1993 South London Gallery (with Andrea Fisher), London

1993 Socle du monde, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

1993 Positionings/Transpositions (with Barbara Steinman), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada

1992 Dissected Space: New Installations 1990-1992, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff.

Since the 1990s, her work has generally shifted from making statements to asking questions. Much more is required of the viewer as performances were replaced by sculptures and installations that required a level of mental and physical interactivity. Her practice has shifted towards site specificity in, for instance, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and Kunsthalle Hamburg.

1989 Mind the Gap, A Space, Toronto, Canada (performance)

1989 The Light at the End, The Showroom, London; Oboro, Montreal

Created in 1988, Measures of Distance illustrates Hatoum's early themes of family, displacement, and female sexuality. The video piece itself is fifteen minutes long and consists of intimate, colored photographs of Hatoum's mother showering. Hatoum overlays the photographs with letters that her mother, living in Beirut during the civil war, wrote to Hatoum, living in London. Handwritten in Arabic, the letters make up the video's narration and themes, and speak to the difficulty of sending letters in a time of conflict. Hatoum reads the letters aloud in Arabic and English. The video roots itself in the brief family reunion that occurred in Beirut between Hatoum and her parents in 1981. While primarily about the mother–daughter relationship, in her mother's letters Hatoum's father is mentioned and thus the father–daughter relationship as well as the husband–wife relationship is examined in this video.

1986 Nine One One Contemporary Arts Center, Seattle, Washington

1985 Between the Lines, The Orchard Gallery, Derry, UK (performance)

1985 Variation on Discord and Divisions, Western Front, Vancouver; Articule, Montreal (performance)

1984 Variation on Discord and Divisions, ABC No Rio, New York (performance)

1984 Variation on Discord and Divisions, AKA Gallery, Saskatoon, Canada (performance)

1984 The Negotiating Table, Franklin Furnace, New York (performance)

Since 1983, Mona Hatoum has been displaying both her installations and her video performance art pieces in exhibitions around the world. She has been featured in individual exhibitions as recently as 2018 at White Cube in Hong Kong.

1983 The Negotiating Table, SAW Gallery, Ottawa, Canada (performance)

1983 The Negotiating Table, Niagara Artists Centre, St Catharines (performance)

1983 The Negotiating Table, Western Front, Vancouver (performance)

In the late 1980s, Hatoum abandoned performances as politically too direct and instead turned her attention to installations and objects, taking up some of the earlier ideas from her student days at the Slade School of Art in London. From then on, she relied on the kind of interactivity that lets the spectator become involved in the aesthetic experience without making the artist as performer the focus of attention.

Hatoum studied graphic design at Beirut University College in Lebanon for two years and then began working at an advertising agency. Hatoum was displeased with the advertising work she produced. During a visit to London in 1975, the Lebanese Civil War broke out and Hatoum was forced into exile.

She stayed in London, training at both the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art (University College, London) between the years 1975 and 1981. In the years since, "she has traveled extensively and developed a dynamic art practice that explores human struggles related to political conflict, global inequity, and being an outsider."

Mona Hatoum (Arabic: منى حاطوم ‎; born 1952) is a Palestinian multimedia and installation artist who lives in London.

Mona Hatoum was born in 1952 in Beirut, Lebanon, to Palestinian parents. Although born in Lebanon, Hatoum was ineligible for a Lebanese identity card and does not identify as Lebanese. As she grew up, her family did not support her desire to pursue art. She continued to draw throughout her childhood, though, illustrating her work from poetry and science classes.