Mona Hatoum’s poetic and political oeuvre is realised in a diverse and often unconventional range of media, including installation, sculpture, video, photography and works on paper.
Hatoum first became widely known in the mid 1980s for a series of performance and video works that focused with great intensity on the body. In the 1990s her work moved increasingly towards large-scale installations and sculptures that aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. Hatoum has developed a language in which familiar, domestic everyday objects are often transformed into foreign, threatening and dangerous things. Even the human body is rendered unfamiliar in Corps étranger (1994), a video installation that displays an endoscopic journey through the interior landscape of her own body. Homebound (2000) is an assemblage of household furniture wired up with an audibly active electric current that combines a sense of threat with a surrealist sense of humour. In Hot Spot (2006) and Map (clear)(2015) Hatoum uses cartography to explore instability and precariousness in today’s political landscape.