Mona Hatoum and the 6ft cheese-grater

Mona Hatoum's art is frightening. She has made giant wire cages lit by naked flickering bulbs, and a 6ft cheese grater that could slice off a hand. She has hung metal whisks, colanders and spatulas from washing lines and sent electricity coursing through them. She has even had a miniature camera inserted into her major orifices, to film her body from the inside.

So meeting her is a daunting prospect, not least because Hatoum does not, by her own admission, enjoy interviews. In Under Siege, her 1982 debut performance piece at the Aspex gallery in Portsmouth, she writhed around inside a transparent plastic box smeared with brown clay. A tabloid storm ensued. "Nude has ticket to writhe," said the Sun. "Taxpayers outraged." Ever since, she has been cautious in her dealings with the press.

Today, however, Hatoum smiles as she strolls into a bright, wide-windowed room at White Cube, the London gallery that represents her. With her umber lipstick and dark curls, she looks softer-edged than I had expected, but she turns serious as we sit down. "I do get angry," she says, "when people ask me stupid questions."

Duly warned, I try one about her 1996 work Current Disturbance, about to go on display at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, part of its Keeping It Real series. It's the first time this room-sized installation – in which lightbulbs flash on and off inside a grid of wire-mesh cages, to the amplified whine of the electric current – has been shown in Europe. Is it strange to see a work made 14 years ago back on display? "Not if I still like it," Hatoum laughs. "I like the fact it's a very experiential piece: you walk in and you're assaulted by the sound. I hope the gallery will play it loudly."

Hatoum made Current Disturbance in San Francisco – where people strongly associated it with prisons, perhaps, she thinks, because of the proximity of Alcatraz. "At the Whitechapel, it's going to have a different feel," she says. "People will read something more into it about cities, perhaps."

Hatoum meant the work as a meditation on urban architecture and the surveillance methods used to police it, themes that began to preoccupy her after she moved to London in 1975 from Lebanon. "It's part of a body of work looking at council flats and architecture as prison – basically, architecture as control. When I came to London, there were all these cameras. I felt like I was in Big Brother-land."

Hatoum was born in Beirut in 1952 into a Palestinian family; her father worked as a customs official in Palestine, and then for the British embassy in Beirut – where he acquired "a very strange Queen's English, spoken with an Arab accent, which I always admired". She grew up with an interest in western art, and recalls poring over tiny reproductions of old masters printed at the back of her Larousse dictionary. But her father was deeply opposed to her becoming an artist, fearing she would find it difficult to support herself. So she trained as a graphic designer, and worked in advertising. "Sometimes people say to me, 'What is your biggest regret?' And I say, 'Wasting five years of my life before doing what I really wanted to do.'"

Hatoum was 23 when she first came to London, on holiday; during her stay, the Lebanese civil war broke out, so she stayed on, under the UK passport her father had acquired for the whole family through his embassy job. She studied at the Byam Shaw art school and then the Slade, going on to create performance pieces such as Under Siege, and video installations such as Corps Étranger, featuring the footage shot inside her body; the latter earned her a 1995 Turner prize nomination.

When Tate Modern put on a major exhibition of her work in 2000, the Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said wrote: "No one has put the Palestinian experience in visual terms so austerely and yet so playfully." Yet she resists attempts to attribute political intentions to her art. "There is definitely a political awareness that filters through my work," she says, "but I'm always trying to do it through the form of the work, not as a political agenda. I don't like it when people hear, 'Oh, she's Palestinian,' and think this must be what the work means. It's a reductive, myopic way of looking."

What does run through Hatoum's art, however, is an interest in the body and its functions, illustrated most graphically in Corps Étranger. She was still a student when she had the idea, and the doctors she consulted were wary. Funding the project proved hard, and it didn't go ahead until 1994, with the backing of the Pompidou in Paris. It was completely painless. "They give you a drug called a 'truth serum'," she says. "You get high and then you start talking, 'Yak yak yak.'"

This fascination with the body, she says, partly comes from the contrast between Britishness and the less self-conscious attitude to physicality that she was used to while growing up. "The British have this physical reserve. Arab culture is very different." And that, she adds, is why the Arab world has so many rules and restrictions about the body. "Otherwise people would go crazy!"