Mona Hatoum, Performance Still, 1985/95, Gelatin silver print mounted on aluminum, 30 1/16 x 42 1/2 inches (76.4 x 108 cm). Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin and White Cube. Photo © Stephen White. © Mona Hatoum
Explore a world of shifting borders and precarious boundaries in the work of Mona Hatoum, a major figure in art today.
Over the past three decades, Lebanese-born Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum (b. 1952, Beirut) has explored the fine line between the familiar and the uncanny in her visceral body of work. Through the juxtaposition of contradictory materials, changes of scale, or the introduction of uncharacteristic elements, she infuses commonplace and even banal objects with an element of danger, references to violence, or the capability to inflict bodily harm. In doing so, Hatoum engages the tactile imagination, her sculptures, photographs, and videos incite viewers to imagine their own bodies in relation to these unruly objects. The myriad and often-conflicting allusions speak both to the history of conflict in the artist’s homeland and to the comfort and safety provided by the domestic realm. Mona Hatoum is drawn entirely from the ICA’s Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women.