ART –

Mona Hatoum is an internationally renowned Lebanese-born, British-based Palestinian artist whose work is both deeply personal and quietly political. Inspired by her familial connections to war-torn Beirut as well as her sensitivity to contemporary racial and gender-based injustice, she transgresses the boundaries of performance, video, and sculpture while strategically reworking minimalism from a vantage point grounded in a feminist and cross-cultural sensibility.
About the Author:
Guy Brett was the art critic for The Times from 1964 to 1975. His books include Kinetic Art (1968), Through Our Own Eyes: Popular Art and Modern History (1986) and Transcontintental: Nine Latin American Artists (1990).

Born in Lebanon, Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum was exiled to London, where she has lived and worked since the mid 1970s and where, in 1995, she was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. Through performance, video, sculpture and installation she creates architectonic spaces which relate to the body, language and the condition of exile.

One of her most spellbinding and best known works is a video installation titled ‘Corps etranger’ where the spectator enters a small pavilion and takes a visual journey through all the orifices of the artist’s body. Such works combine states of emotion and longing with the formal simplicity of Minimalism, creating powerful evocations of displacement, denial and otherness. Hatoum’s many international exhibitions include the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris (1994); her work tours extensively to museums throughout the United States in 1997.

Brett explores key themes around a sense of place, the body and communication which emerge from Hatoum’s range of work. The artist describes a chronology of practice in conversation with Archer, and de Zegher makes a complex and provocative analysis of ‘Recollection’, a work she commissioned for a 16th century beguinage. The book also includes Hatoum’s own notes, statements and previous interviews.

pp. 160 illusts #030226 (name on fep)