Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum is one of the most influential artists of her generation. Her performances, videos, photographs, sculptures, installations and works on paper, focuses on displacement, marginalisation and state control – themes that she explores against the backdrop of both her own biography and current social developments. Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon in 1952. While on a short visit to London in 1975 the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War prevented her from returning home. She has lived in London ever since.

Hatoum’s works are often full of contradictions and can trigger both feelings of fasci-nation and dismay in equal measure. Her work is characterised by the use of a lucid, minimal formal language often juxtaposed with tough industrial materials. In her most recent works, Hatoum turns in particular to the precarious conditions of the planet we inhabit. In expansive installations, she uses basic forms that on the one hand suggest order and stability and on the other carry the potential of sudden collapse. Walking a tightrope between solidity and precariousness, the familiar and the uncanny, beauty and terror, they provide a commentary on the conflicting feelings and situations that we are exposed to in a present marked by political conflict and climate emergency. Her works deal with the tension between the human being subjected to social constraints.

A cooperation project of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the KINDL – Center for Contemporary Art and the Georg Kolbe Museum.

Curators: Marius Babias, Kathrin Becker, Julia Wallner